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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

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Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#271

Post by tredre3 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #96
29athrowaway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice is a noble yet doomed project that tries to fix the unfixable: the incredibly slow, highly complicated and unaesthetic StarOffice originally developed by Sun, that later reincarnated in OpenOffice. Fixing that suite is so monumentally effort intensive that you would be better off rewriting it from scratch or porting features to a simpler suite like Abiword/Gnumeric, etc. FreeOffice is the free version of…

Is LibreOffice really that slow? Sure, it takes a while to start up, but after that my experience has been that it's as performant as Microsoft Office or Google Docs (ie. pretty much instant for everything I've done with it). Just start it once and keep it running, and you won't really have to worry about performance. As for aesthetics, it looks fine to me... just like any other generic office app... besides which, a…

It is extremely sluggish on all my machines (both Windows and Linux with large amount of memory and cores).

I don't mind the start up performance, it's fine.

But scrolling is sluggish, drag and dropping is painful, opening mid-sized spreadsheets takes forever, and on most of my machines even just typing have a noticeable delay.

Even Google Docs feels noticeably faster and it's running on 12 more layers of abstraction so I can't really explain why is LO so bad...

Note: Disabling Skia or hardware acceleration completely does help with performance on some computers.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#272

Post by Gigachad »

oneshtein wrote: post #163
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's easier to run LibreOffice using Wine than Flatpak.

How exactly? You just click install in the Gnome software app, and then click the LO icon in your apps list.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#273

Post by orra »

nerdponx wrote: post #237
lvass wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full or no filesystem access is very, very far from proper sandboxing.

As far as I know, Flatpak offers a fair amount of control over sandboxing. It's just that isn't particularly useful for some thing like a document processing application that you usually want to be able to use on files in various parts of your system. The alternative might be giving it access to one particular directories, and then copying files there when you want to work on them. But that's already pretty cumbersom…

> It's just that isn't particularly useful for some thing like a document processing application that you usually want to be able to use on files in various parts of your syste

The good news is there is a solution to this. The trusted system shows a file picker, and then grants access to the sandboxes application.

This is called the File Chooser Portal. https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html...

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#274

Post by tkuraku »

wheelerof4te wrote: post #176
tkuraku wrote: post #130

I usually uninstall libreoffice and install the up to date flatpak anyway. This seems like the smart thing to do.

LO in fedora is usually up-to-date version. I don't know the situation with RHEL.

Yeah, this is in reference to RHEL and friends. Generally the LO version is older.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#276

Post by gbraad »

bandrami wrote: post #119
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.

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.

Not sure which package problems are swept away according to you? You mean possible issues with library reuse, devendoring, etc?

Besides, why 2 KDE AND 2 Gnome versions would be needed. The 'minimal' freedesktop would most likely suffice.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#277

Post by bluGill »

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?

No, I trust my distribution to do that for me, and more importantly update libraries as needed. With snap and flatpack I have to trust every single upstream to keep track as if there is a problem i'm vulnerable until everyone updates.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#278

Post by bluGill »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #268
seabass-labrax wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just being sandboxed though isn't a help if you actively want the software to process sensitive data! If you want to read a private document in LibreOffice, you have to be sure your copy of LibreOffice and every library it calls is trustworthy and reasonably secure.

I dunno, if it's sandboxed and doesn't have network access then the only attacks I can think of are either really indirect (embedding an attack in saved files in hopes of hitting another user) or really targeted (altering a specific document or phrase when it's read). Assuming the sandbox works and includes blocking of network access, what attack do you see a word processor performing even when handed sensitive data?

Most word processors have some web abilities. Click and link and the web browser opens. That link can be custom crafted to send data.

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#279

Post by lost_tourist »

Gigachad wrote: post #272
oneshtein wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to run LibreOffice using Wine than Flatpak.

How exactly? You just click install in the Gnome software app, and then click the LO icon in your apps list.

Yeah, there's not way it's easier than using rpm/snap/flatpak

Re: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

#280

Post by asddubs »

lyu07282 wrote: post #247
twangist wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

inkscape is good though. I've never used illustrator, so I have no idea if it could replace it, but it's not fair to lump inkscape in with gimp
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