Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#191

Post by b112 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

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…

It lets them focus on more enterprise-y features and improve overall security.

Such a minor amount of work saved, if any, and it's all for cost savings, with a reduced user experience.

Yup. Redhat as IBM.

Modern IBM has fallen so far, and could never, ever create or originate something like redhat.

So buy it, they did, and now legions of managers preen, and describe how to "improve" redhat, each cutting, shaving cost, impressed with themselves.

And don't believe the "hands off" junk, they still have purse string control.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#192

Post by Conan_Kudo » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

creatonez wrote: post #64

Gigachad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. It does make sense for at least one distro to be offering this, as there are numerous reasons to favor the traditional linux distro way of doing things. Flatpak is better for a lot of use cases, but it's missing a lot by not having a centralized system of check…

New maintainers picked up LibreOffice, so that will still happen, since LibreOffice wasn't retired from Fedora.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#193

Post by jahewson » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:47 PM UTC

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?

I mean, at Google scale the investors in global capital all know each other and invest in each other’s funds anyway.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#194

Post by nr11_bullseye » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #143

People mention Google Docs a lot in this thread. There seem to be a server version of LibreOffice, called confusingly LibreOffice Online and Collabora Office (?) somewhat interchangeably; Collabora is the #1 contributor to LibreOffice. I cannot find a free online demo of that though, so I don't know how good it actually is. edit: there is also some confusing thing about maximum number of users, and if you want to rem…

It's decent enough for me to use it instead of Google Docs but it definitely has it's limitations. While Google Docs seems to render things on the client side, Collabora Online renders everything on server side, which makes this uncomfortable to use with slow internet.

While the feature set of Collabora Online is decent, there are some missing, for examples you can't insert/edit mathematical equations and there are no macros. Templates are supported but you have to create them externally and then upload them.

I think it's good enough to write a few pages of text but it's not good enough for power users who write 100-page essays or use complex formatting.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#195

Post by jahewson » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

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?

Line wrapping is often different between different browsers, so things end up on different pages for different users.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#196

Post by jahewson » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

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?

Gamers want HDR too.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#197

Post by jahewson » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #99

noobermin wrote: post #69

I get libreoffice is "bad" but the existence of alternatives online really drive home how it is not impossible to develop a modern office suite alternative to office. I honestly wish I could have a desktop tool again, I'm tired of giving the large IT corps more data they can train on. It's possible with some love. Blender did it, it is quickly becoming an accepted tool in 3D graphics circles, if not the standard.

How do the online suites handle word documents? IMO one of the problems with the LibreOffice/OpenOffice projects is that they took on an impossible challenge, working with Microsoft’s semi-documented mess of a file format. An office suite might not be hard, but Word is made of hacks and kludges, matching them is nearly impossible.

> Word is made of hacks and kludges, matching them is nearly impossible.

The newer OOXML formats are fine. They’re only hard to implement because the feature set of word is gigantic. PDF is much worse.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#198

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

mr_mitm wrote: post #122

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 b…

I think spreadsheets are great, I hadn’t thought to include them in with office suites, I mostly use GNUmeric.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#199

Post by quink » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

Flatpaks continue to horrify me because of fundamental stuff like this that keeps getting completely ignored: https://github.com/flathub/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice/issue...

I swear, Desktop Linux has continued to regress in a downwards spiral since Mac OS X was first released, so only for about the past two decades.

I also love the “solutions” that are recommended for when this happens with basically every Flatpak out there. They’re all either 1. install this application to change your settings after your stuff is gone or invisible and remember to do it forever or 2. instead of that application simply type these 80 characters into Terminal.

Linux Desktop is a parody of itself.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#200

Post by trop » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

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?

Of course one could argue that the hardcore Linux (er, GNU/Linux) document creator will use Emacs with AUCTeX (or canny uses of org-mode), with rendering via XeTeX/LaTeX/LuaTeX... Or markdown piped through pandoc, for those who want to take it easy.

LibreOffice, it's a slippery slope... Next thing we'll be using the mouse and ditching the tiled window manager.