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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

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Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#181

Post by jahewson »

kaba0 wrote: post #62
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 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.

Nix is great conceptually but after 20 years of boiling the ocean, I would call the experience difficult and erratic, not “splendid”.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#182

Post by lstodd »

eastbound wrote: post #157
ghaff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, you are not. This is truely strange.

I can understand giving away grocery lists to the world, but not this.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#183

Post by wheelerof4te »

chriscappuccio wrote: post #128

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

I recently used Libre Office Writer for developing professional-grade documentation. we had Word installed on our remote desktops, so I opened the document in Word just to compare how it looks like.

I was horribly formatted and the fonts looked off. Then I saved the file in Word and opened it in LO Writer again. Even more issues.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#184

Post by awill »

wheelerof4te wrote: post #173
awill wrote: post #170

I don't really see the problem. I want the rock solid underpinnings of RHEL, and am ok with older kernels etc.., but I generally want updated apps like LibreOffice, Firefox etc.. To me it makes sense for those things to be Flatpak, and for you to just get them directly from the source. A Flatpak of LO maintained by LO, a flatpak of Firefox maintained by Firefox etc.. What's the problem with that?

There is no problem with that. But it is just a simplified way of saying "Look! You can build your own software directly from the maintainers, but faster and much easier!" Basically, a glorified Gentoo way. We're back to square one.

It's not really building anything. You would just download a few apps from flathub.org

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#185

Post by wheelerof4te »

JackSlateur wrote: post #166
mr_mitm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

And that hordes of laymen, empowered by excel, flowed the world like a plague Haa, the fabulous "yes, this is our program, we wrote it in excel because macro because we can and do not know how to do better" if you never met it, you are lucky for being spared

I worked with a Office layman who couldn't (and did not care to learn how to) open RAR files.

Yeah.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#186

Post by George83728 »

ekianjo wrote: post #55
psychphysic wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are pivoting the work they do for workstations away from applications to HDR etc. That 'for' doesn't mean they are pivoting to Workstations. Guess it's a bit ambiguous, but anyways so libre office won't be a package on RHEL that's no big issue so long as the RPM and flatpak work fine.

HDR sounds like a nice excuse rather than a genuine reason...

Exactly, one has nothing to do with the other. Or maybe people think that the Red Hat employees presently tasked with packaging LibreOffice also happened to be graphics stack specialists with the experience needed to bring HDR to Linux. That seems unlikely to me.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#187

Post by wheelerof4te »

awill wrote: post #184
wheelerof4te wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no problem with that. But it is just a simplified way of saying "Look! You can build your own software directly from the maintainers, but faster and much easier!" Basically, a glorified Gentoo way. We're back to square one.

It's not really building anything. You would just download a few apps from flathub.org

I know, I was just being hyperbolic.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#188

Post by LeFantome »

einpoklum wrote: post #145
LeFantome wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, Windows has no out-of-the-box office productivity suite. But - at large companies, and most organizations with IT services setting up a machine for you, the default image installed for new users does have it. For independent individual users, if we could somehow arrange it so that LO were installed by PC builders / laptop vendors - that would increase its user base from ~200M to 2 Billion within a few years.…

“At large companies, and most organizations with IT services” you are increasingly likely to get an Office 365 subscription. If so, you can use your web browser to access all of this stuff including Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams.

If your company has standardized on Office 365 or Google Docs, the experience is pretty similar on all platforms ( Linux included ).

I use Outlook in a browser more than I launch it as an application ( even on Windows ). The same is true of Teams. To be honest, I do not use Word heavily much anymore ( but it works more than well enough to read any doc I might need on Windows ).

On Linux, I do tend to use LibreOffice to author presentations or spreadsheets rather than PowerPoint or Excel in the browser. Office 365 online would work fine for most of what I do though.

LibreOffice is more for people that DO NOT work large companies I think.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#189

Post by b112 »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #59
ekianjo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works everywhere is a stretch. Flatpaked applications have multiple issues

Bespoke RPMs that have to be patched and modified for distros by a small group of maintainers have issues too.

Redhat is just falling.

It was a pain doing packages 25 years ago, comparatively it is simple now.

Frankly, the flatpak will have issues as well, but those will be outside of Redhat's direct control.

Which means the end game, will be a redhat flatpak.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#190

Post by supportlocal4h »

oneshtein wrote: post #164
supportlocal4h wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So only people capable of auditing source code and build scripts are able to be maintainers of opensource packages for others.

Perhaps you missed the part about not needing distro-specific packagers by providing a way to run third party apps without having to trust third party packagers. You can deny access to the camera or filesystem or network without ever auditing the source code and trust that the software cannot misbehave in that aspect.

This isn't a knock on the value of package managers or maintainers. It's just an obvious step in better security. It seems silly to argue that integrity among package maintainers is the only safeguard we need. I personally like the little piece of plastic that my laptop has that slides across the built-in camera. It's not a software solution, or even an electronic safeguard. It's even better than the little DIP switch on my phone. I say, why not?

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