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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#51

Post by ghaff »

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 documents are probably a much overlooked enabler for people to work remotely in the current situation.

Added: They do mention LibreOffice Online but that seems like it should be a more central point in the discussion.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#52

Post by npteljes »

aphroz wrote: post #6

Is there a hosted service for LibreOffice online ? I wish I could find a better replacement for Google Drive.

I recommend checking out ONLYOFFICE. They have a personal tier with a small online storage for free. And everything is AGPLv3.

https://personal.onlyoffice.com/

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#53

Post by genidoi »

mgbmtl wrote: post #25

I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many comments. An assumption that software should "just work", be completely bug free, have the best design, have developers quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while giving away the product for free. I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm grateful it exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies, service providers/reseller…

This is the de facto complaint of open source software, and initially I thought the entitlement can really only be explained by laziness, after all why don't people just bother to read the source code and contribute the feature they want?

But then I realized its way way more rudimentary than that. A substantial amount of software developers struggle w/ interpersonal communication skills, and so often what may have been intended as a polite feature suggestion came across as entitlement, if not bewilderment that a feature doesn't exist through a poor choice of words combined with a lack of empathy that we see everywhere throughout the internet anyway.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#54

Post by tluyben2 »

duncanawoods wrote: post #31
tluyben2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you make a video of that? I am clicking myself silly (ubuntu 18.04 / 6.0.7.3) and cannot repeat that behavior. I use calc a lot and it rarely crashes (less than excel/windows which, on my ms surface tablet, actually quite regularly crashes or hangs).

Sure, here you go: https://imgur.com/a/PZMaqff org.gnome.Shell.desktop[4355]: Window manager warning: Invalid WM_TRANSIENT_FOR window 0x9000024 specified for 0x9000965 (LibreOffic). You have shamed me into raising a bug ;) edit: raised, the 6.0 branch is EOL, doesn't happen in 6.4.5.2

Ah, I am using i3wm as wm; that might be the difference...

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#55

Post by setzer22 »

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 keybindings they've made.

And it's not like you can easily get an old version of blender and make it work just because it's free software. Leaving aside the fact that I'd be missing out on newer features, system libraries get updated and at some point the old version stops working with a random crash. Then you need to start compiling from source and basically maintaining your own fork.

IMO this is what happens with large enough pieces of software where the devs care more about increasing adoption in spite of any happy existing users.

Sorry for the blender micro-rant, they are doing a great job. But still I felt it was the perfect example of microsoft-y behaviour in free software land

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#56

Post by npteljes »

Jonnax wrote: post #10

I haven't used Libreoffice in years. Did they ever update the UI styling? I remember it had a very "java" look to it. You know that feeling when you open an app, you know it's going to be a bit janky.

You can configure it to have a ribbon, and other complex toolbar layouts too. I use it for work on Linux, and I think it's quite well done - and I hate Java also.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#57

Post by chrismorgan »

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…

Meanwhile, I’m a prospective Blender user, and I hear it’s waaaaay better from 2.80, so that for various things where I might have used another program or given up and used nothing I would now be very likely to use Blender. It’s always a balancing act: satisfying existing users, against genuine improvement that will make it better for new users and existing users that put in the effort to learn the new way.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#58

Post by stefankeys »

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…

Just use LaTex with Vim for documents if the org you work at allows it.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#59

Post by ghaff »

HeckFeck wrote: post #37
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…

Recently, I installed Office 97 onto Wine just for curiosity. I could still do much with it. The only feature I really missed from Word was academic references. I could create documents indistinguishable from modern Word using the old drawing features combined with modern fonts. The drop down menus, combined with the floating toolbars were much more intuitive than clicking up and down some "ribbon". The drop down men…

>perfected after years of refinement and familiarity

That can be a problem though. One person's familiar tool with its well-known quirks and peculiarities is a newcomer's inscrutable and illogical interface.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#60

Post by ACS_Solver »

Jonnax wrote: post #10

I haven't used Libreoffice in years. Did they ever update the UI styling? I remember it had a very "java" look to it. You know that feeling when you open an app, you know it's going to be a bit janky.

It has visual class libraries that give LO a slightly different look depending on what you're running it on.

I'm typing this from a Debian system running KDE Plasma, and my LibreOffice reports using the gtk3_kde5 VCL. It uses Qt5 widgets and looks, for the most part, like a regular KDE Qt5 application. It no longer looks or feels like a Java application. Because it's not - Java is optional except in LibreOffice Base. You can disable JRE in the options, and LO parts that are not Base will retain nearly all functionality.

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