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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

lwn.net

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Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#151

Post by creatonez »

pjmlp wrote: post #132
creatonez wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their desktop products are Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation, Red Hat Edge, and the Red Hat Universal Base Image build system. The former is used heavily in particle physics laboratories (CERN and Fermilab use a mix of RHEL, Alma, CentOS) as well as some niche graphics workstations. The latter two are used for a lot of different things, but can be used to manage automatically-updating company-assigned desktops/laptops, and the tools behind it have been extended by the community to offer consumer-grade desktops like UBlue.

They have deep involvement in a ton of different Linux desktop technologies. They also package the Red Hat Flatpak repository, which is the RH equivalent of Fedora Flatpaks. These are Flatpaks that are built by combining the RPM build process with additional flatpak-specific metadata. There is ARM support for all of this, unlike Flathub which is spotty on non-x86-64 architectures. Currently RH Flatpaks is a "tech preview" feature of RHEL9, but it will likely be more fleshed out in RHEL10.

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...

https://www.redhat.com/en/products/edge

https://redhat-connect.gitbook.io/partner-guide-for-red-hat-...

(Not a Red Hat project) https://ublue.it/

https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/rhel9/inkscap...

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#152

Post by htag »

water-your-self wrote: post #144
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.

Cool which one of those is libre?

Exactly. These SaaS solutions are way less (speech) free, with anything you write being a accessible to various powerful entities depending on legal jurisdiction you reside in.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#153

Post by GlacierFox »

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?

Image and video editing. The vast majority of VFX shops run on RHEL/ Alma. I expect the microscopic fraction of users who use desktop Linux, then the even more microscopic fraction of users who use Linux for Libre Office is just not worth supporting over other more important things.

Besides, I think you can just install Libre Office using Flatpak.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#155

Post by tlamponi »

bonzini wrote: post #50
tlamponi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well your excerpts aren't really clearing up all confusion IMO, but even the original message is somewhat confusing too: >> … 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. Here you left out the part that they'll do that only until older RHEL releases, that still have LibreOffice support are EOL:…

No, they plan to maintain the RPMs for RHEL 7/8/9 and to contribute fixes for Flatpak, which is how they expect people to consume LO (without Red Hat support) in RHEL 10 and perhaps in future Fedora releases. I for one am a periodic LO user (for both work stuff and personal sheets like tax returns) on Fedora and will switch next week to Flatpak to start reporting bugs. I already use Flatpak for OBS, Ferdium and VSCod…

> Fedora has a Flatpak repository that is separate from FlatHub.

Yeah, it sounded a bit like this, but with all those comments here and LWN I started to get confused myself.

And I definitively could have just looked it up so appreciate it all the more that you cleared it up to me, many thanks!

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#156

Post by tlamponi »

chrismorgan wrote: post #53
tlamponi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well your excerpts aren't really clearing up all confusion IMO, but even the original message is somewhat confusing too: >> … 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. Here you left out the part that they'll do that only until older RHEL releases, that still have LibreOffice support are EOL:…

I think you may be misinterpreting it. They’re saying “we’re not maintaining LibreOffice RPMs beyond the current supported versions of RHEL, because we think Flatpak is the way forward, but we recognise that there are currently problems with it, so we will put some effort into fixing those, so that us no longer offering RPMs isn’t disastrous”.

Yes indeed, seems like I got a bit confused myself here, thanks!

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#157

Post by eastbound »

ghaff wrote: post #120
ajross wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying

The idea that Google has every startup’s term sheet, plans, budgets, is really strange to me. USA can so easily spy on every other country’s data.

Am I the last dinosaur? Are all the other concerns dead?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#158

Post by UncleEntity »

loeg wrote: post #149
packetlost wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that's an optimistic read of their short and vague statement. Someone has to do the work of packaging it and if they're stepping back (for both RHEL and Fedora), who will do the work?

The volunteers who maintain thousands of other packages?

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#159

Post by Tagbert »

ghaff wrote: post #120
ajross wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fortunately you can work on shared cloud documents while still having more features and the faster response of local applications. I often work with local Excel or Powerpoint apps on cloud documents while another colleague is working on the same document. If I need to share the document, I just add someone to the share list. If someone emails me a document to work on I switch it to a cloud document and then share it back to them to try to change their habits of sending out discrete copies of documents.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#160

Post by dang »

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…

Ok, we've changed to that from https://lwn.net/Articles/933525/. Thanks!
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