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

101–110 of 316 posts

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#101

Post by LeFantome »

inefficient wrote: post #27
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…

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason has more to do with the number of users. I haven't used LO in some time, but back when I only used linux, I never found it to be a particularly pleasant experience. It definitely looks better now that I'm looking at it, but I switched to using google docs back at university. If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything…

Frankly, LibreOffice is amazing these days.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#102

Post by _cenw »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
dralley wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Consumer desktop product. That's a category that nobody competes in. Apple sells hardware that incidentally includes macOS and Microsoft hasn't cared about selling Windows licenses directly to customers for years and their OEM licensing business for consumer devices (i.e. non-Pro licenses) is neat, but it couldn't sustain Windows by itself.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#103

Post by LeFantome »

phkahler wrote: post #35
inefficient wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason has more to do with the number of users. I haven't used LO in some time, but back when I only used linux, I never found it to be a particularly pleasant experience. It definitely looks better now that I'm looking at it, but I switched to using google docs back at university. If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything…

>> If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation. A Linux distribution is more than the sum of its parts. Having out-of-the-box ability to read MS office docs is a huge deal. Nobody wants to fuck around installing something extra to read a defacto standard document format.

Having to install a Flatpak does not make Linux any less “out of the box” than MacOS or Windows. They are all going to require installing something.

If you are not going to buy Microsoft Office, LibreOffice may be your best bet on all platforms.

These days, if you ARE going to buy Office, it is likely to be a subscription to Office 365. If you are a subscriber, you can your documents in a web browser in Linux as well as you can on Windows. You can even use Edge.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#104

Post by joao_lopes »

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?

That's a false comparison. You can still edit documents using LibreOffice installed via flatpak, or, like probably most users, use Google Docs, Office 365, or OnlyOffice.

Meanwhile without proper HDR support and better color management, Linux desktop is basically a non-starter for any professional creative use-case, including design, animation, illustration, image and video editing.

Ideally both would be done but they seem to have limited resources, so in this scenario I personally fully support their choice as it will enable Linux desktop usage to a whole new user-base (which is also a paying user-base, namely animation studios that use RHEL).

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#105

Post by MereInterest »

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…

And AppImage distribution has the same fundamental security problem as static binaries, making it difficult or impossible to replace downstream dependencies. When a dynamic library needs a security update (e.g. heartbleed in libssl), the shared library can be replaced system-wide. When a static executable or AppImage needs a newer version of a library, you need to update the program entirely, and there is no way to do so across all programs system-wide.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#106

Post by bee_rider »

WYSWYG office suites were a mistake. Combining the editing and the display compromises both. They seem destined to become giant unmaintainable monoliths. They solve problems that are fundamentally really hard but also incredibly boring, like making layout decisions on the fly. And finally they are just boring in a way that means nobody is really that interested in contributing.

Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML are much better options if fancy text is really necessary. Often it is better to just do plain text though.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#107

Post by supportlocal4h »

dralley wrote: post #77
pmoriarty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle.

LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas.

It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#109

Post by nazgulsenpai »

nologic01 wrote: post #92

While this feels like just a delta in the scheme of things it sounds like it is a delta with the "wrong" sign. For ages now it is clear that the Linux desktop community has lost the plot of how to move forward in the era of "cloud" and "AI" even while its value proposition, intrinsic advantages and cumulated achievement are immense. There is fragmentation, duplication, silos, and lack of interoperability among the va…

I don't understand the point you're making. Is it that Libreoffice should be training open source AI using my local sensitive data? Or that the future AI powered office suites won't be some sort of subscription based PWAs?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#110

Post by ajross »

mumblemumble wrote: post #83
pmoriarty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Cloud office tooling has won, at this point. There will always be a handful of (mostly spreadsheet) users who insist on doing things locally, but at this stage that is emphatically a small minority. And of that market, LibreOffice has captured essentially none of it.
Post reply on HN