LibreOffice 3.3 Released Today

mikejuk writes "Only four months after the formation of the Document Foundation by leading members of the OpenOffice.org community, it has launched LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of its alternative Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Since the fork was announced at the end of September the number of developers 'hacking' LibreOffice has gone from fewer than twenty to well over one hundred, allowing the Document Foundation to make its first release ahead of schedule The split of a large open source office suite comes at a time when it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites at all. What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

Comments

link

[Anonymous Coward]

link to main site http://www.libreoffice.org/ instead of lame-ass blog talking about it

Easy Hacks

[Enderandrew]

Now that they don't have to worry so much about maintaining compatibility with Sun/Oracle's version (like they did with the go-oo fork), they can fix a lot of old cruft. If you want to get involved, there is a list of easy hacks that should provide a starting point for people who want to contribute.

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks

Re:Easy Hacks

[Enderandrew]

And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.

Some of these are already addressed in LibreOffice, but I think it would be a nice starting point in a community fork to address the things the community obviously wanted, but Sun didn't prioritize.

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?resort=1&Submit%20query=Submit%20query;issue_type=DEFECT;issue_type=ENHANCEMENT;issue_type=FEATURE;issue_type=PATCH;issue_status=UNCONFIRMED;issue_status=NEW;issue_status=STARTED;issue_status=REOPENED;issue_status=RESOLVED;email1=;emailtype1=exact;emailassigned_to1=1;email2=;emailtype2=exact;emailreporter2=1;issueidtype=include;issue_id=;changedin=;votes=25;chfieldfrom=;chfieldto=;chfieldvalue=;short_desc=;short_desc_type=allwords;long_desc=;long_desc_type=allwords;issue_file_loc=;issue_file_loc_type=fulltext;status_whiteboard=;status_whiteboard_type=fulltext;keywords=;keywords_type=anytokens;field0-0-0=noop;type0-0-0=noop;value0-0-0=&order=issues.votes%20desc%2C%20issues.priority%2C%20issues.issue_type

Re:What idealistic state?

[vossman77]

I think this was already done.

Re:What idealistic state?

[ludwigf]

I hope that this fork encourages the inclusion of Go-OO patches. In fact, it would be good if Go-OO and LibreOffice were merged .

Actually Go-OO was discontinued in favor of libre-office which includes most of the patches already.

Re:What idealistic state?

[GameboyRMH]

Yep the Go-OO patches are included in LibreOffice.

I'm going to remove Oracle OO.org and install LibreOffice on all my PCs when I get home.

Re:What idealistic state?

[PeterBrett]

So: If I install LO work, how well will it work with DOC files? All my coworkers are using Word 2003 and I don't want to cause any disruption by sending them funky files.

Things interoperate pretty well, in my experience, particularly if you are using exactly the same fonts. In some cases, LO/OOo seem to manage to open .doc files more reliably than MSO, which seems bizarre; might be due to the way that the import/export filters are implemented in each.

Re:Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look into the Google case more. While the obvious stuff about Dalvik being a shameless rip of Java is true, it's not illegal, and the actual copyrighted code being sued over is not used in any way for a production Android system -- it's just the sort of testing cruft that builds up in a code repository if nobody's careful. Google's certainly liable for damages, but those damages will not be much, and the success of Android is in no way affected by any possible outcome.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Press alt.

LIbreOffice in Ubuntu

[MagicFab]

If you're using Ubuntu, and want to try LibreOffice, I wrote a few details here:
http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2011/01/25/the-document-foundation-launches-libreoffice-3-3

Most importantly *don't install .debs manually* and *don't reinstall if you already have 3.3 RC4, it's the same as 3.3 final* :)

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

No. Open a presentation and try to view it. The button you want is more clicks away than it used to be, and this is the most common feature.

It's at the bottom right corner, exactly 1 click away. How much easier can it get?

And OMFG the file menu is now that big stupid circle.

ctrl+p or ctrl+s still print and save. Regardless the first time you start the program, a big arrow points to it and says "THIS IS A MENU." Anyway, they changed it in 2010 because people apparently had trouble with it, and made it look more like the menus you see in Firefox 4, Wordpad, Paint, Opera etc.

Re:...crashing MS Word

[cain]

You really should stop the drumroll before you say the word or else no one is going to be able to hear it.

Re:What idealistic state?

[arth1]

gnumeric works well enough for my needs -- it's fairly Excel compatible (obviously except for Visual Basic and OBE hooks), and probably an easier switch for an Excel user than OO.o/LO calc is.

gnumeric also has a smaller footprint than OO.o/LO calc (and when run on a system with Gnome already running, a way smaller footprint).