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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

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Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#81

Post by pmoriarty »

creatonez wrote: post #70
psychphysic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it does not make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. This assumes companies don't make mistakes. They do. A lot. And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.

> And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes. Generally, RHEL does exactly what RHEL customers want. They are extremely loyal to their user base. The issues come when these changes set a trend and ripple to the rest of the community, and affect people who would never become a RH customer in the first place (e.g. anti-systemd fanatics)

So there was some kind of referendum of RedHat users that asked them what features of the Linux operating system they wanted systemd to absorb?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#82

Post by creatonez »

pjmlp wrote: post #76
creatonez wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Greetings from 2008, https://www.slashdot.org/story/100116

That certainly aged poorly. Whoever wrote that had no clue what the next decade of Red Hat would actually be like.

When this was written, desktop Linux still looked like this https://distrowatch.com/images/screenshots/debian-lenny-gnom... and by 2018 a new set of desktop interoperability standards had been introduced and incorporated into most Linux desktops, with Red Hat as the main organization behind this.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#83

Post by mumblemumble »

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 companies I work at are all using either Google Docs or Office 365. The collaboration benefits are pretty immense, and can save people a lot of synchronization and communication effort. Most my colleagues see oldschool desktop document editing software as obsolete and frustrating to work with.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#84

Post by pmoriarty »

noobermin wrote: post #69

I get libreoffice is "bad" but the existence of alternatives online really drive home how it is not impossible to develop a modern office suite alternative to office. I honestly wish I could have a desktop tool again, I'm tired of giving the large IT corps more data they can train on. It's possible with some love. Blender did it, it is quickly becoming an accepted tool in 3D graphics circles, if not the standard.

How is Libre Office bad exactly?

It has always seemed like an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office to me.

What don't you like about it?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#85

Post by freedomben »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #2

I guess Fedora users are supposed to use flatpak from now on. Between this and the recent VAAPI controversy Fedora starts to lose some of that shine that made it appealing for me for many years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API I wonder why way smaller distributions are fine with maintaining LibreOffice, but Red Hat supposedly doesn't have enough resources to keep it going.

On the VAAPI thing, do you disagree with their legal analysis? Do you think they can ship patent-encumbered algorithms?

I think it sucks, but it would suck far more to see Fedora/Red Hat hit with legal challenges over it. It's also not usually a huge deal. This is the sort of thing that RPM Fusion has been great for many years.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#87

Post by 29athrowaway »

louky wrote: post #39
29athrowaway wrote: post #12

FreeOffice is a superior alternative. Just not open source.

Thanks for that, I've haven't looked beyond Libre in years. Trying it out on Debian11 now.

Make sure to enable the HiDPI mode which is not the default for some reason.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#88

Post by dale_glass »

duped wrote: post #78
dale_glass wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can, the trouble is that you don't know that say, libfoo.so loads libbar.so at runtime, and so you need to also package up libbar.so.

Otherwise, libbar.so won't be found in your AppImage, will get loaded from the host instead, and now it explodes but only on some distributions.

In my case it was OpenSSL loading stuff at runtime.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#89

Post by 29athrowaway »

pmoriarty wrote: post #86
29athrowaway wrote: post #12

FreeOffice is a superior alternative. Just not open source.

In what ways it it superior?

LibreOffice is a noble yet doomed project that tries to fix the unfixable: the incredibly slow, highly complicated and unaesthetic StarOffice originally developed by Sun, that later reincarnated in OpenOffice. Fixing that suite is so monumentally effort intensive that you would be better off rewriting it from scratch or porting features to a simpler suite like Abiword/Gnumeric, etc.

FreeOffice is the free version of SoftMaker Office. A performant, visually pleasing office suite that is closer to the state of the art in office suites. Running it does not transform your computer into a heating system.

Unlike WPS Office, another popular and free office suite (developed in China by KingSoft), SoftMaker is developed in the west by someone I can actually sue in a non kangaroo court in the EU if something goes wrong.

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