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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

lwn.net

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Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#111

Post by cripblip »

cjmcqueen wrote: post #95
mrweasel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tend to prefer Google over other docs tools. Occasionally I hear that people feel it's terrible, but I don't understand why. Would you mind sharing a few things that bug you the most?

+1 the collaboration features of Google docs are so good, does not have feature parity with say MS Word, but I have not missed local apps

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#112

Post by hulitu »

criddell wrote: post #34
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 think this is a small step in the right direction. IMHO, Flatpak (and similar schemes) with strict sandboxing should be the only distribution method for user applications. If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. If you want to give that application access to everything your user has access to, that’s fine, but it s…

> If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources.

Why would LibreOffice need access to microfone or location ? Asking for a friend.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#113

Post by jolux »

hulitu wrote: post #112
criddell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a small step in the right direction. IMHO, Flatpak (and similar schemes) with strict sandboxing should be the only distribution method for user applications. If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. If you want to give that application access to everything your user has access to, that’s fine, but it s…

> If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. Why would LibreOffice need access to microfone or location ? Asking for a friend.

It shouldn’t, that’s the point.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#114

Post by duped »

dale_glass wrote: post #88
duped wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In general a program that calls `dlopen()` must either ship with the libraries being opened (in the case of OpenSSL, which iirc only does this with libcrypto or one of its targets in some cases?) or be able to resolve them without the help of the loader via default paths.

But all that said if you don't want your app to explode on different distros you always need to vendor your dependencies, including transitive dependencies. That's just the sad reality of shipping programs that are dynamically linked.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#115

Post by nologic01 »

nazgulsenpai wrote: post #109
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?

libreoffice should make use of locally running open source AI that (optionally) has been fine-tuned (by the user) to local data.

"AI" is just a proxy for a vast range of, e.g., Python or R or julia algorithms and libraries that libreoffice could already tap via extensions, scripting etc.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#116

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

For Office 365 I totally see how it renders LibreOffice like local monolithic obsolete.

On Google Docs though, it's limited enough to hit some roadblock every now and then. Last time it was a gigantic csv that took forever to render as a spreadsheet. Other times it was formatting problems that made the document unusable. It's rare, but happens enough to warrant an alternative local office suite to deal with the exceptions.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#117

Post by jmbwell »

FWIW and like it or not, libreoffice is the best or only way to do some of the things it does.

I don’t actually use it directly as an office suite really ever. But I do use tools that use its libraries, like unoconv, or that depend on it for other things, like Nextcloud.

It’s a beast and a burden, but if you need to deal with Office documents of unknown provenance, programmatically, it’s a valuable and relevant set of tools.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#118

Post by rurban »

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.

They do control the desktop. Nobody else is close to them

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#119

Post by bandrami »

Gigachad wrote: post #33
chrismorgan wrote: post #21

This LWN article makes the matter supremely confusing. The linked mailing list post is way better and clearer and it would be good to get this submission changed to it: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... Key excerpts: > … the LibreOffice RPMS have recently been orphaned … > … will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way…

This is probably how things will be moving. It doesn't make sense for every single distro to maintain customized versions of user level applications now that we have one package that works everywhere.

Flatpak is a non-starter for me. The runtimes required by my office would mean 2 KDE versions and 2 Gnome versions installed as flatpak runtimes in addition to the KDE running on the host, which quintuples the security space I need to monitor.

Sweeping package management problems under a rug doesn't actually make them go away.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#120

Post by ghaff »

ajross wrote: post #110
mumblemumble wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're collaborating with other people (with some narrow exceptions), the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying. And, to your point, LibreOffice is from an era when providing a plausible alternative to Microsoft desktop products was a big deal. It really isn't at this point. Mainstream users use cloud-based options and specific power users use Microsoft Office.
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