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LibreOffice 6.1 released

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#71

Post by kijin »

kqr wrote: post #60
kijin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, I think the trend you described will only become more popular as the world moves away from printed media. When STEM people think of a "final production medium", they usually think of articles in journals. But who reads paper journals anymore? Most people who are active in their fields don't even read PDFs of paper journals; they've already seen the preprints on arxiv. We're all just exchanging tarballs of s…

> The thing I like the best about Microsoft Word is the review feature. Multiple people can edit, annotate, and comment on specific parts of the same document. You can inspect each diff and either accept or reject it. Everything is color-coded and can be manipulated using a mouse. It's like commenting on a github commit, but much more intuitive for people whose job is to exchange human-readable documents, not source…

Programmers' tools are great for dealing with plain text, so if you write plain text, good for you! But other people often deal with things that aren't plain text, and I don't think it's a good idea to try to squeeze them into the lowest common denominator just because it's more natural for us.

It's easy to underestimate how much meaning ordinary people bestow upon layouts, colors, and other stylistic choices that programmers often think is frivolous. I think we should focus more on how we might design tools that allow people to work together effectively on non-plain-text content (rich text, photos, videos, you name it) than how we might convince everyone to adopt our plain-text tools.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#72

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

> What do you people use word processors for?

Dealing with people who use word processors.

(Word processors are hateful and waste large chunks of my time whenever I have to deal with them it seems.)

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#73

Post by mksaunders »

ptero wrote: post #69
mksaunders wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site. OK, we're using open source tools to try to improve the site. Plenty of other FOSS projects do this... Not sure why we're being singled out :-)

You are not singled out, treat this as user preferences or feature requests. People here are direct, but this is an environment feature of HN. Most folks here greatly appreciate your work (I do). That said, let me throw a few more stones: 1. The fact that you use OS tools to track users is almost irrelevant. I can still collect and lose data with FOSS tools. A tool is a tool (and tracking is tracking). 2. Sorry, I am…

> tracking is tracking

But as another commenter here mentioned, simplifications like that do far more damage than good. In the broader world, "tracking" on the internet generally refers to companies following you all over the web and selling your data. By saying "tracking is tracking", you lump TDF's use of Piwik (for our site, for our own use, with obfuscated data in storage and a clear privacy policy) with that of advertising providers, who really do track you all over the web, don't tell you what they store, and sell your data. By saying "tracking is tracking", you tar everyone in the same brush. That's lacking nuance and really, really unfair to volunteer-driven FOSS projects (many of which use Piwik) that are just trying to do their best.

> You should not care how much time users spend on your site, etc.

Well, that's your opinion! But many of us in the LibreOffice community see the website as a major part of the product (and project). Do we want to spread the word about FOSS? Compete effectively with MS Office? Build our community and attract new contributors? Encourage donations so that we can support the community? Then we need a well-structured and useful website. Analytics tools help a lot in that.

> In fact, your web site can be pretty basic for downloading new software.

Again, that's the way you see it, fair enough. But actually the site needs to do a lot more than that. It needs to encourage people to try the software (screenshots, videos etc.) It needs to provide help, and support options, and front-ends to mailing lists. It needs to provide infrastructure for the project and community as a whole. The more we can optimise that - with the help of some analytics tools - the stronger we can make LibreOffice and the community. That's very important to us; if you disagree, join the LibreOffice project website list and put forward your case :-)

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#74

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

wila wrote: post #17
mksaunders wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then simply use the older icons :-) EDIT: Three steps: 1. Go to Tools > Options in the menu 2. Click View on the left 3. Then choose Icon style on the right

> Then simply use the older icons :-) Simple for you doesn't mean simple for other people. Without writing down the steps on exactly how-to use the older icons, it doesn't equate to simple in my opinion. IOW, you probably had done yourself a favor to not use the word "simply".

"It's great that what I want existsb but I want it by default and I don't want to lift a finger to do it". OSS doesn't work that way.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#75

Post by kqr »

Aloha wrote: post #66
kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

I live in a world where I have to interact with non-technical people, and I need to produce documents that are editable by those non-technical people. Non-technical people can take a document produced by pages, MS Word, and OO Writer, and load them up, make changes and send them back. The cloud has not yet caught up with my part of the industry I work in. I'd love to be able to work in Markdown (or even groff) and th…

> my most favored document interchange format, provided that edibility is not a prime desire.

Come on, Baader-Meinhof! I literally just seconds ago learned the term "faulty diction", and then you throw in my face an editability/edibility mixup.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#76

Post by ptero »

mksaunders wrote: post #73
ptero wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not singled out, treat this as user preferences or feature requests. People here are direct, but this is an environment feature of HN. Most folks here greatly appreciate your work (I do). That said, let me throw a few more stones: 1. The fact that you use OS tools to track users is almost irrelevant. I can still collect and lose data with FOSS tools. A tool is a tool (and tracking is tracking). 2. Sorry, I am…

> tracking is tracking But as another commenter here mentioned, simplifications like that do far more damage than good. In the broader world, "tracking" on the internet generally refers to companies following you all over the web and selling your data. By saying "tracking is tracking", you lump TDF's use of Piwik (for our site, for our own use, with obfuscated data in storage and a clear privacy policy) with that of…

> ... simplifications ... that "tracking is tracking" do far more damage than good.

Point taken. I do not post-edit my posts for content, but I completely agree that LO's tracking is almost certainly at the benign end of the scale. It was a bad formulation on my part

On the other two points, though, your post reaffirmed my position. The way I understood it is you want to track (benignly, within the site only) users to generate funding, advocacy, onboarding, etc. This collecting user data to influence their behavior is, to me, starting down a slippery slope. That slippery slope has Facebook-like mind manipulation at the end of it; it is very far, but once you start in that direction it is very hard to stop.

Well structured and useful website indeed helps greatly. But one should be able to get there, or 90% there, using only anonymous information. This is just my opinion (I do take a harder line on privacy than most users). Cheers!

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#77

Post by apetresc »

kqr wrote: post #75
Aloha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a world where I have to interact with non-technical people, and I need to produce documents that are editable by those non-technical people. Non-technical people can take a document produced by pages, MS Word, and OO Writer, and load them up, make changes and send them back. The cloud has not yet caught up with my part of the industry I work in. I'd love to be able to work in Markdown (or even groff) and th…

> my most favored document interchange format, provided that edibility is not a prime desire. Come on, Baader-Meinhof! I literally just seconds ago learned the term "faulty diction", and then you throw in my face an editability/edibility mixup.

Well, PDFs don't taste very good, either.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#78

Post by mksaunders »

ptero wrote: post #76
mksaunders wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tracking is tracking But as another commenter here mentioned, simplifications like that do far more damage than good. In the broader world, "tracking" on the internet generally refers to companies following you all over the web and selling your data. By saying "tracking is tracking", you lump TDF's use of Piwik (for our site, for our own use, with obfuscated data in storage and a clear privacy policy) with that of…

> ... simplifications ... that "tracking is tracking" do far more damage than good. Point taken. I do not post-edit my posts for content, but I completely agree that LO's tracking is almost certainly at the benign end of the scale. It was a bad formulation on my part On the other two points, though, your post reaffirmed my position. The way I understood it is you want to track (benignly, within the site only) users t…

Thanks for your understanding and fair discussion :-) On this point:

> This collecting user data to influence their behavior...

I think that's a really negative and cynical way to look at what we and other FOSS projects are doing. Here's an example of what we can do with some basic website analytics data: we can put a banner on the download page saying "Made by the community - you can be a part too!". The banner links to a "Get involved" page, encouraging people to join the project.

Then, with analytics tools, we can see how well that works. We can do A/B testing by having some download pages with the banner, some without, and see which ones help bring new people into our FOSS community. This is really useful and good for us all!

Now you could say this is about "influencing behavior", and in a super pedantic sense it is. But again, when people talk about websites "influencing behavior" the big topics at the moment are Russian troll farms, Cambridge Analytica etc. I don't think it's fair to use terms like that when we're not trying to play mind games with anyone!

> That slippery slope has Facebook-like mind manipulation at the end of it

Ah please, we're just a small non-profit entity organising a FOSS project and trying to make a website that encourages people to get involved. The "slipperly slope" argument doesn't work well. One thing doesn't inherently lead to another. With that argument, drinking beer leads to other substances which leads to X Y Z... Nah, I've been drinking beer for years and haven't touched anything else. Beer is great enough :-)

Really, if you have a genuine fear that some LibreOffice community members using Piwik to improve the site could lead to "Facebook-like mind manipulation at the end", please do join the website list, put forward your points and let's deal with it! But having been involved in FOSS projects for over 20 years, I don't think that's a concern. People are just trying to do the right thing :-)

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#79

Post by earenndil »

kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

I don't. I generally write plaintext or html in a texteditor.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#80

Post by xtracto »

maaark wrote: post #13
sleepless wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here you go: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.1#Icon_Th...

Thanks, I hate it. The old icons were far clearer as to their purpose. Save is now a download button in case children don't recognize a floppy...

At first I thought you were being pedantic, but when I saw the download symbol as "save" it just felt... weird.

I agree that at some point we will need to change the floppy disk, but it was just interesting the feeling I had when trying to grok the down arrow as "save".

Guess it is just a matter of getting used to it.

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