Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 316 posts

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#71

Post by pmoriarty »

trop wrote: post #68

The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is > We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing. [0]: https://lw…

What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#72

Post by blihp »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #19

How much have RH been contributing to LO? They warn that it's a lot of work. It would have been interesting to know how much ... is this a sign that RH can't afford to run their business? People are saying 'well, easy enough to install it from elsewhere' but surely the point is a major Linux company are no longer willing/able to support a principle business application. I'm assuming that support also included bug-fix…

> is this a sign that RH can't afford to run their business?

Afford has nothing to do with it... IBM will continue tightening things up with/at RH to get their ROI.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#73

Post by creatonez »

pjmlp wrote: post #61
hannob wrote: post #5

When IBM bought Red Hat this was the kind of thing I worried might happen: That Red Hat might stop supporting the Linux Desktop. I have no idea how their announcement makes any sense. They want to improve workstation experience by... not offering an office application any more? Like, what do you even mean by workstation?

Red-Hat has officially given up on the Linux Desktop about 15 years ago. There are enough places to read that announcement and related reactions.

Red Hat has not given up on desktop Linux. Not in the slightest.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#74

Post by pjmlp »

dralley wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red-Hat has officially given up on the Linux Desktop about 15 years ago. There are enough places to read that announcement and related reactions.

If by "given up", you mean still investing more (sometimes far more) into desktop Linux than practically anyone else. Desktop is simultaneously not a large priority for Red Hat, and even less of a priority for every corporate player that isn't Red Hat. RH is still doing a lot of work on things like Pipewire, Wayland, Flatpak, Gtk, Gnome, AMD graphics drivers (David Arlie wrote RADV), making the Nvidia graphics driver…

To the extent required by Red-Hat Enterprise paying customers.

If anything, it shows how much everyone still cares.

Greetings from 2008 Slashdot,

https://www.slashdot.org/story/100116

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#75

Post by pmoriarty »

kaba0 wrote: post #62
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #30

Flatpak will be the recommended way to get / install LibreOffice on RHEL and Fedora. In https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe... it states: "the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term." Install instructions are already written: https://acces…

I am not particularly happy with Flatpak - I still think it mixes up two things (packaging, sandbox), and is not particularly good at the former. Nix actually solves the former issue, and does so splendidly. I would much rather see better sandboxes for linux.

Agreed, though I'd much rather see this done with Guix.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#76

Post by pjmlp »

creatonez wrote: post #73
pjmlp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red-Hat has officially given up on the Linux Desktop about 15 years ago. There are enough places to read that announcement and related reactions.

Red Hat has not given up on desktop Linux. Not in the slightest.

Greetings from 2008,

https://www.slashdot.org/story/100116

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#77

Post by dralley »

pmoriarty wrote: post #71
trop wrote: post #68

The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is > We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing. [0]: https://lw…

What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?

The former has tons of plausible alternatives which are already more frequently used than LibreOffice - and of course you can still use LibreOffice via Flatpak anyways.

The latter is a hard requirement to doing serious media editing work on Linux regardless of what software you want to use. And unlike the former, there's a dedicated customer base that wants it.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#78

Post by duped »

dale_glass wrote: post #63
contrarian1234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about AppImages right? I've tried several times to understand how Flatpak works and how to integrate a CMake build with Flatpak.. and I'm honestly befuddled. Granted a quick Google search does show the situation has improved a bit in the past year. I imagine if you're trying to package a Zig or Clojure application it's going to be a lot of figuring things out on your own

AppImage is also troublesome. I just spent a good while debugging ours. The TL;DR is that AppImage amounts to a self-extracting archive, and you need an application where all the binaries and libraries have a relative rpath. So rather than loading /usr/lib/libz.so, it uses $BINARY/../lib/libz.so. That part's not too bad, but what can cause a lot of trouble is that there's a fair amount of stuff that uses dlopen at ru…

Can't you just add an rpath to your main executable (which cmake does by default for release builds that aren't installed, fwiw) or use a launcher that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#79

Post by mrweasel »

pmoriarty wrote: post #71
trop wrote: post #68

The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is > We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing. [0]: https://lw…

What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?

Only the color sensitive part is exclusively related to image and video editing. It's an interesting question, over the past few years I've only sparsely done document editing in anything but Google Docs (which I still find absolutely terrible). Most of the "documents" I write goes into systems such as Confluence or various wikis, rarely do a produce an actual document in a word processor.

I might be completely wrong, but it seems like word processing is becoming a bit niche, something limited to legal and sales teams.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#80

Post by freedomben »

touisteur wrote: post #24
miohtama wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be simple matter of having two software support licenses. One for operating system and one for application. This is how most software works today. Red Hat knows if their customers are buying Red Hat license to get support for LibreOffice. I would assume this is a case only for very small number of customers, as Red Hat is mostly focusing on server product. And today companies can buy the same support from Li…

Following this, does it mean they'll reduce the price for RH subscription? Just because one can buy support elsewhere (yay OSS - BTW who offers enterprise support for LibreOffice on RHEL I'm curious?) doesn't mean one can't be salty to have support for a major part of their subscription go away with no compensation.

Current RHEL subs are still supported and will be until EOL, so nothing has been taken away. This is a change for future (yet unreleased) versions of RHEL
Post reply on HN