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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

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Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#131
post #17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then its a badly written headline

Well I think it still is a correct headline. In a linux distro, when it "support" a package means that you can contact its maintainers for help (bugs and etc) on the package. So the headline means that RHEL won't help you to install LibreOffice. There are always other way to install it though.

Right but people generally do not install packages from just anywhere in corporate settings. I am sure there are a lot of places where either red hat packages the software or you don't get to use it.

Not to mention, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to install an unsupported app like a compiler or mail/ldap/web server.

And if something goes wrong and you're not using the supported version of the supported package, you don't get support. (Which is how it should be I think)

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#132
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where is the desktop product?

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/all-products

I see cloud, OpenShift, SAP, embedded, servers, desktop not really.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#133
post #102
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The shopping mall down the street certainly has Windows Home DVDs, as does Microsoft online store.

Try to find value added enterprise desktop.

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/all-products

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#134
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, HDR basically doesn't exist on Linux at this stage. I believe there's some (insufficient) scaffolding in the kernel for it, but no support in the common display stacks.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#135
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To my knowledge, there was no working HDR of any kind until the last year, when Valve hacked in hardware-specific HDR into Gamescope, and even that only works if you really get your hands dirty.

Last month there was a hackathon with all the big players (Valve, AMD, Nvidia, KDE, Red Hat, Wayland) to finally settle on a plan for universal compositor HDR implementation.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#136
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?

In 2023? I would argue image/video editing for sure.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#137
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…

How does this make one drop LibreOffice as a package?

If I focus on video editing, do I drop... say, Thunderbird, because of "adjusting my engineering priorities"? What are users of my distribution supposed to use, by default? This sounds weird, if not disingenuous.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#138

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.

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 excep…

It's just not shipping by default, I don't think they're removing it from their repositories, so you can still install it if you want

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#139
post #62

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.

Well, Nix mostly solves that issue so well due to a continuous massive offering of blood and sweat though, let's not kid ourselves. It's a significant amount of work to package arbitrary software because arbitrary software does weird and bizarre things.

But IMO the fundamental principles underlying the design are sound and granular compared to most of the alternatives, though, that's for sure.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use. Yesterday I was reading Becker's Writing for Social Scientists, 2nd ed. This is a 2007 revision of a book originally published in 1986, and includes at chapter titled "Writing with Computers" which includes much of the chapter "Friction and Word Processors" from the 1986 edition. I recall a moment of bemusement realizing how archaic the term "word processor" sounded to my ear.
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