LibreOffice: The Next Five Years • Hacker News Board

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#301

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #51

There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared docu…

> They do mention LibreOffice Online

And it says there is revenue there, correct? Maybe that's why it isn't expanded.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#302

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #147

monk_e_boy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - students have already moved to google docs or MS Word with OneDrive. We are used to giving feedback using these tools, students making changes and getting those signed off by us. Full history of changes. Full history of lecturer comments. Backed up online. Editable on phones, laptops, PCs... This is the world they are expecting when they enter employment, or start their own start up.

To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that there's still the level of apparent interest in standalone LibreOffice that there is. I work somewhere that was almost exclusively a LibreOffice shop but we adopted one of the online services. Although we didn't really force people to switch, I don't know the last time I've seen a LibreOffice document even if I imagine some people still use it.

Office suites are a huge piece of the pie so even minority use cases get a decent number of users.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#303

Post by smabie » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #254

airstrike wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a "Power User" and I've memorized every single hotkey on the Excel ribbon interface to the point that I don't care where they are. Wrap text? Alt H A W Open settings? Alt T F T Change to page break view? Alt W I. Go back to normal view with Alt W L Take the border I currently have on the top edge of a cell and swap it to the bottom? Alt H B M Alt+T Alt+B Paste values transposing? Alt H V S V E. Want to follow the…

I'm an emacs user. You have made me feel warm inside.

Emacs is a lot like Excel in many ways: they both make you feel like wizards. I suck at excel, but I've seen some analysts who are crazy good at it. You watch them use it and numbers and shit just start appearing out of nowhere. It's pure magic!

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#304

Post by cycloptic » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

setzer22 wrote: post #55

openfuture wrote: post #20

It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces. Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you. Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it in an hour. This was supposed to be fundame…

I think this problem is not at all exclusive to propietary software. Take blender, for example. I spent quite a bit of time learning all the bits of the interface 5+ years ago. When I tried to go back, the software UI had changed so much that basically most of my knowledge and muscle memory is now worthless, having to google how to do every tiny operation. And this is not yhe first "huge overhaul" of the UI and keybi…

It seems unrealistic to want new features but also be against any kind of refactoring or efforts to bring in new users. As you have found, it's time-consuming to backport things and the people who actually want that are not usually willing to do it. Probably because it doesn't bring in new users and therefore makes no money. Free software really doesn't change anything abut this, projects that want to become popular still need to prioritize growth.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#305

Post by ulisesrmzroche » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

Why so much talk about the ribbon? This article has nothing to say about that. This is about a Personal Edition and an Enterprise edition and how little revenue its actually coming in.

Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore. Looks like Enterprise is gonna have a commercial license.

By the way, I think the ribbon is far better than the ugly dropdown menus. It's also been over a decade since it was introduced. Some of yall are so resistant to change is bordering on zealotry. I hate to remind everyone about dropbox but dropbox.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#306

Post by leonidasv » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

lbwtaylor wrote: post #264

leonidasv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.

I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering. I only did a very brief demo of it, but I was not impressed.

Yes, unfortunately. Makes impossible to work under unstable connections.

I hope Webasm enable porting at least some of the rendering code to client-side in the future.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#307

Post by jakamau » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #76

Jonnax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus. The most common operations are descriptive buttons. Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor before. Which one would be more intuitive? It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think in terms of "I want to do X…

I'm going to disagree here. Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and 2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the new one. Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it doe…

Speaking only for myself, but the ribbon interface helped me learn the majority of keyboard shortcuts I use today.

Once I leveled up past basic Ctrl+C/V/X, hitting Alt and having the Ribbon UI guide me through the shortcut combinations was helpful. I concede Control+Shift+V is easier, but having a visual guide until I finally memorize all the different paste options with ALT H V has it's merits as well.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#308

Post by bluGill » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

slfnflctd wrote: post #122

bluGill wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your school was wrong to teach any program. Ui follows fads and always will. Thus you need to learn how to use any ui that might come.

I agree with this, but it was far less clear in the 90s. I think a lot of people (myself included) were expecting/hoping that UIs in productivity software were converging on some sort of finished design or standard that there wouldn't be much reason to monkey around with. MS Office programs - and many other proprietary software titles - were taught not only in many schools, but also in various vocational programs. Yo…

In the 90s word was still trying to take the crown from word perfect. Everyone knew guis were the future, but the F Keys in word perfect were important to know.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#309

Post by zoomablemind » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #195

edoloughlin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago. What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub menus I've been using Office since the early 90's and the ribbon interface for the last 13 years. I still can't find stuff easily in the ribbon interface. It's like there's some cognitive barrier to me retaining the layout of anything beyond the Home ribbon (or tab?). Any time I…

It sounds like the issue is that the layout isn't spatial. There isn't a 1:1 mapping between place and object. The same place can have multiple objects depending on what tab's selected.

Adding to this is the ribbon content is just too busy. It fused icons with labels and stuffed it in some uneven grid. The regular toolbar was more or less even grid, well, a row. The usual menu is also structured on quite uniform grid. It's mentally easier to follow straight lines, we read in straight lines, scroll in straight lines, well, typing too. Yet when it comes to ribbon, the adjustable grid layout makes one adopt an adjustable scan pattern.

I find this pattern quite distracting. Always feels like I'm staring at the old-time toolbar customization dialog, as if someone spilled buttons out of a toolbox onto the screen, and to make it more fun, also mixed them with labels...

Anyone remembers the initial requirement for the ribbon to use the specific font, as it was used for positioning and could not be customized? Not sure if it's still the case.

I wish MS promoted a style-based workflow/mindset more than the free-hand formatting. Perhaps, this would by itself eliminate the need for the busy toolbars, if only during style design.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#310

Post by crazygringo » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #305

Why so much talk about the ribbon? This article has nothing to say about that. This is about a Personal Edition and an Enterprise edition and how little revenue its actually coming in. Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore. Looks like Enterprise is gonna have a commercial license. By the way, I think the ribbon is far better than the ugly dropdown menus. It's also been over a decade since it was introduced.…

> Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore

The personal version still will be, right?

Now this would be something to worry about if all new feature development were put into enterprise, and the personal version stagnated.

But from my experience in enterprise software, enterprise features are generally not even applicable to consumer users at all. They're things like single sign-on, approval workflow integration, private cloud integration and whatnot.

It's not as if a bugfix for page margins will make it to the enterprise version and not the personal one.

So this doesn't feel like something to worry about. If it provides the necessary financial resources to keep the personal edition alive, then I'm all for it.