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LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

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Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#91
I have a few questions that don't seem to be fully answered in the post.

> This “Personal Edition” tag ... has the purpose of differentiating the current, free and community-supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem.

Will this "LibreOffice Enterprise" be Free as in Freedom? Would I be able to package it up myself and call it "Community ENTerprise Office Suite"?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#92
post #38

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…

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…

> The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago.

Came here for this. The first version of Office for windows (which is what most people are familiar with in terms of UI) is from 1998, so the non-ribbon interface has been around for 9 years, vs 13 for the ribbon interface.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yup, that's the thing, people love to complain on random social media platforms, but most people can't be bothered to report bugs. been guilty of it myself as well of course

As someone who frequently encounters bugs, let me explain why I don't usually bother to file bug reports: No one cares.

Choose any large long-lived open source project at random and search their issue tracker and I guarantee you can find at least 3 open bugs that are 5 years old or more. I know, because I've run into these bugs, as have dozens of others, and went to report them only to find they had already been reported years ago with no action taken by the developers.

Filing bugs takes time. You're going to want reproducible steps, you're going to want logs, you're going to want me to try different things. That's fine, and I'm willing to do that to get my bug fixed, but only if I think you actually give enough of a shit to fix it. I don't enjoy wasting my time any more than you do. When I see 5 year old open issues your tracker, where several users have chimed in, submitted logs, etc. and you've done nothing, I assume you don't care so neither do I.

Worse yet, many developers are downright hostile to users reporting bugs or, god forbid, making feature suggestions. Spend five minutes in GNOME's issue tracker to see what I mean.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#94

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 still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office now has some janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance to how it used to be.

This is a general pattern for GUIs as of late. It changes every so often until the point where if you haven't used the software in a while, you no longer know how to access a particular function via the GUI interface.

For example, web browsers used to have the standard drop down menus (file, edit, etc). If I want to view page source, the option would probably be under the view option and titled appropriately. These days, I have no idea where to find it, but at least I still know the keyboard shortcut to do the same thing and that hasn't changed at least.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#95
post #43
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to feel that way about the ribbon, but I quickly got used to it and now consider it an improvement. What I’ve never got used to is the flattening of the UI in versions 2013+.

I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft. ADDED: Ah, this is probably it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 (That said, MS Office in gen…

> I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft.

I have also seen well-intentioned arguments for why Clippy was a good idea … but he wasn't.

To this day I miss the Word 5.1 on Macintosh System 7. That was more-or-less the Platonic ideal of a word processor; it's been all downhill since.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#96
post #88
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…

I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that…

It's there but with the clear and explicit intention that the free version will lag behind the commercial offers.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#97
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…

So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to memory in the past 17 years?

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#98
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone…

>Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. With all due respect, good luck with that. A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.

> A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.

That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance. They just want to know who to talk to so they can order what they want from Sears.

Re: LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

#100

I‘d like to use a open source text editor. But libreoffice text rendering is so bad, i cant use it. At least thats the case for me on osx, but i think this applies to all plattforms. Just compare text rendered in libreoffice and to the one in pages. It hurts my eyes.

The upcoming version is moving from Cairo to Skia for text rendering. It might help.
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