Live data from Hacker News

LibreOffice 6.1 released

blog.documentfoundation.org

81–86 of 86 posts

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#81
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wasn't asking for it and am just fine with the new icons.

Only pointing out that "simple" is something in the eye of the beholder. If you know how something works, it is often simple.

FWIW I have been working for over 20 years in OSS ;) and often thought things are simple only to find out that users need a bit more hand holding.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#82
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…

This is the most ignorant programmer thing I've seen said on hackernews. Utter lack of understanding for how all office workers interact and share information through Office documents.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#83
post #60
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…

I think you overestimate the technical ability of many users who are using tools such as Microsoft Office (or Libre Office), given many of them struggle even with those tools never mind anything more technical.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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 link…

Thank you as well for the discussion! I think it helped me understand better the reason for my own reluctance to ignore even a pretty benign form of tracking by a FOSS project.

First, I have no fear that LO will be used for nefarious purposes. And even in the worst, unlikely case of all collected data leaking or getting sold to FB, NSA or your-favorite-villain, the harm done will be several orders of magnitude less than the provided benefit of building a FOSS office suite. Viva LO, cheers to its developers.

But we have an overall erosion of trust. We do not trust remote systems or software any more. In the age of shareware (mid-late 90s) software downloaded from unknown sources was in general assumed benign. Possibly stupid, but rarely actively harmful. Today, even with apps from Play/App-store, the default assumption is that they are trying to do something against the user. To install or not install question depends on whether the benefit they provide is greater than that harm.

"Something against the user" is now monitoring and tracking (access to contacts, photos, camera, mic, WiFi info) and it is always explained as improving user experience. Sure. Seeing such logic instantly raises a red flag for me and, sadly, catches your use case as well. While I have no doubt that LO is doing none of this my thought (based on learned priors) is "Et tu, Brute".

Just a guess, but in today's environment you may get better ROI (funding, advocacy, whatever) by not tracking users at all and prominently boasting of this. As I mentioned in the thread above, you probably can get most of the information you need to tune the site from web server logs anyway. Again, just a single user opinion / data point.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#85
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it on Linux and macOS and it's pretty fast with CSV files (although I'm not sure how large the ones you're using are!) If it's specific CSV files that are causing an issue, and you don't mind sharing them, you could attach them to a bug report: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org Also try resetting your profile in case that's an issue: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile#Resolving_co...

25MB files "work" but still abnormally slow for my 16GB RAM machine, 200MB files forget it. I'll do some more testing and report.

I can confirm that large CSVs are dog slow on libreoffice. If excel can do it a lot faster (which it can) this should definitely be logged as a bug.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#86
post #83
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you overestimate the technical ability of many users who are using tools such as Microsoft Office (or Libre Office), given many of them struggle even with those tools never mind anything more technical.

Those tools have interfaces that have remained virtually unchanged since the infancy of personal computing. I highly doubt they represent the pinnacle of user interaction.
Post reply on HN