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

121–130 of 316 posts

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#121

Post by 29athrowaway »

pmoriarty wrote: post #96
29athrowaway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is LibreOffice really that slow? Sure, it takes a while to start up, but after that my experience has been that it's as performant as Microsoft Office or Google Docs (ie. pretty much instant for everything I've done with it). Just start it once and keep it running, and you won't really have to worry about performance. As for aesthetics, it looks fine to me... just like any other generic office app... besides which, a…

In modern hardware you may not perceive the difference but in older hardware the difference is more noticeable.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#122

Post by mr_mitm »

bee_rider wrote: post #106

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 bette…

Office suites cover quite a bit more use cases than LaTeX or markdown. Civil clerks worldwide use Word daily to create dense forms for people to fill out. That is a major pain in the ass to achieve with the tools you mentioned; you basically need a developer on call to create a template for you. Office suites enable almost untrained users to achieve that autonomously. Excel empowered hordes of complete laymen to do basic programming and perform database queries. I don't like office suits either, but credit where credit's due.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#123

Post by torstenvl »

MereInterest wrote: post #105
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…

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 d…

And conversely, when a dependency introduces a critical vulnerability, the AppImage or static build is unaffected.

But on a system where everything is updated at the same time through a package manager, I don't see that there's a material difference, unless you as the upstream app developer decide not to build against the latest security updates of your dependencies; but if that's the case, that's a completely separate issue from dynamic vs. static linkage.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#124

Post by supportlocal4h »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #58
rajamaka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find this take so weird. Do you audit every single line of code from OSS you use?

I don't read every line of code but yeah. I think I spend more time reading code for curiosity's sake than actually using many programs. I absolutely read build system scripts, I won't run make until I know what's gonna happen. I also enjoy stracing random programs in order to figure out the exact set of system calls they're making, in which order and with which parameters.

So only people capable of auditing source code and build scripts deserve to be able to trust software? There should never be any other way to offer trustability?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#126

Post by dmix »

joao_lopes wrote: post #104
pmoriarty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

If they have real studios using it I'm guessing this just means plug and play HDR support? As opposed some previously working set up requiring tweaking it yourself?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#127

Post by ac2023 »

Hardly related as this is more server-side, but it seems CentOS is getting a lot of traction with cloud companies these days.

Microsoft also apparently going large scale with CentOS-based Azure Linux.

The question is: What is the best solution going forward for desktop productivity software on Linux?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#128

Post by chriscappuccio »

Libreoffice has been a huge mess for years. It's unreliable garbage for anyone who is trying to work with documents from other people. It might be OK for composing stuff from scratch, that is until it crashes while you're in the middle of a document. I've never found it reliable under any OS. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, or what people actually reliably use it for

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#129

Post by supportlocal4h »

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)

I'm not convinced that people who are not paying Redhat for RHEL Workstation support count as customers on this question.

But this is still an odd statement. Previous customers who very much relied on LibreOffice might move to some other platform or at least some other support service. Thus they would no longer be Redhat customers and Redhat would still be loyal to their customers.

I suspect the number of RHEL Workstation customers to be a relatively small part of Redhat's customer base. And those that depend on LO support to be even smaller. I don't expect this to affect RH's bottom line in any negative way.

Post reply on HN