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

241–250 of 316 posts

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#241

Post by twangist »

mumblemumble wrote: post #83
pmoriarty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?

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.

Furthermore, Libre Office is not the slickest software, nor do they listen to their users. For about a decade people have been asking, Wth do you mean, I can't select multiple images in a doc and move them?! The team's response remains, You're not supposed to do it that way, you must first smush all your images down into one, then import and move that. This prescribes a waterfall model of doc creation; they're admitting Writer discourages experimentation and stifles creativity. Just a rotten UX and a rotten attitude. They should get better or get lost.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#242

Post by rowanG077 »

pjmlp wrote: post #202
creatonez wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/lap…

CERN researchers mostly use Windows and macOS, even if the LHC cluster is powered by Linux. Back in 2003 - 2004, I was one of the few in my group, ATLAS/TDAQ, that bothered to have a laptop with Scientific Linux, and I doubt it has changed. All of those projects are a by product that Red-Hat Enterprise Linux also needs a graphical user interface, not a desktop product on its own.

To say it was like this in 20 years ago and I doubt it has changed is pretty crass. Especially for such as Desktop Linux which is essentially unrecognizable from 20 years ago.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#243

Post by kwhitefoot »

pmoriarty wrote: post #84
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 is Libre Office bad exactly? It has always seemed like an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office to me. What don't you like about it?

Writing macros or whatever they are called is painful.

Writing an application or macro in VBA is much simpler.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#244

Post by nikodunk »

rowanG077 wrote: post #238
piaste wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "monitoring security spaces"? Are you frequently refreshing the bug boards of every library your applications and OS uses?

Not all. But I'd wager it's not uncommon for a lot of linux people to periodically check their most used software with the largest attack surfaces. Browsers, document viewers/editors, mail clients, decompressors etc.

We do not :)

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#245

Post by blablabla123 »

criddell wrote: post #34
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 think this is a small step in the right direction. IMHO, Flatpak (and similar schemes) with strict sandboxing should be the only distribution method for user applications. If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. If you want to give that application access to everything your user has access to, that’s fine, but it s…

It's all open-source and auditable, so any odd application behaviour should be prevented in the first place. Sandboxing is great but cgroups are not a sandbox. I think the post shows also that the main problem is amount of maintenance for many distributions. Maybe better package tooling would help - in the end Flatpaks are just a middleway between completely integrated packages and distributing everything as a self-contained tarball.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#246

Post by Teknoman117 »

nikodunk wrote: post #244
rowanG077 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all. But I'd wager it's not uncommon for a lot of linux people to periodically check their most used software with the largest attack surfaces. Browsers, document viewers/editors, mail clients, decompressors etc.

We do not :)

I would definitely like to say I do but I definitely do not.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#247

Post by lyu07282 »

twangist wrote: post #241
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.

Furthermore, Libre Office is not the slickest software, nor do they listen to their users. For about a decade people have been asking, Wth do you mean, I can't select multiple images in a doc and move them?! The team's response remains, You're not supposed to do it that way, you must first smush all your images down into one, then import and move that. This prescribes a waterfall model of doc creation; they're admitt…

I would get mad over this stuff 10 years ago but it feels a bit strange to complain about libreoffice`s broken ux in 2023.

People who claim libreoffice can replace office remind me a bit of people who claim gimp can replace photoshop, or inkscape could replace illustrator. Laughable

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#248

Post by ZiiS »

torstenvl wrote: post #123
MereInterest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 separa…

You only need one hole. A newly introduced vulnerability compromises the system as soon as one package updates. A fixed dependency only works when every single program is updated.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#249

Post by lyu07282 »

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.

It's not impossible but extremely difficult to make an office suite, it's also probably one of the most boring things to do. Libre office is one massive incomprehensible pile of ancient rotting c++ and java code dragged along over 38 years (staroffice). You can imagine how nobody with any sense of UI/UX or people who write for a living would ever touch it let alone dedicate their free time working on this mess. The self selected people left to work on it are very apparent in it's esthetics and everything, or lack thereof. What's left are FLOSS enthusiast's, but that doesn't make a competitive office suite.

Blender on the other hand has a massive community and dedicated leadership who pour every last bit of love and soul crafting this software, that gets significantly and noticeably better every few months.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#250

Post by thrwawy74 »

piaste wrote: post #225
bandrami wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flatpak is a non-starter for me. The runtimes required by my office would mean 2 KDE versions and 2 Gnome versions installed as flatpak runtimes in addition to the KDE running on the host, which quintuples the security space I need to monitor. Sweeping package management problems under a rug doesn't actually make them go away.

What do you mean by "monitoring security spaces"? Are you frequently refreshing the bug boards of every library your applications and OS uses?

I'm very interested in some sort of daemon that regularly scans for vulnerable binaries/libraries and produces desktop notifications about this and/or hosts a web interface to review issues. I do use clamav for malicious files, but bug advisories/vulnerabilities are another area I wish I could make convenient to monitor for personal computing. I've seen things like Splunk reports in enterprise settings, but not for personal 'digital hygiene'

Anybody have a list of open source solutions here?

Post reply on HN