Compared and Contrasted: OpenOffice V. LibreOffice

GMGruman writes "Oracle's imposition of fees for some OpenOffice capabilities caused some of the venerable open source office suite's creators to head out on their own and create LibreOffice as a truly free OSS tool. InfoWorld's Neil McAllister reviews the two OSS productivity tools side by side to figure out where they differ, and whether you can jettison Oracle's OpenOffice safely for the fully free LibreOffice."

Comments

Printable version

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the print version (all one one page instead of four). There's still ads, but it's better.
Also, frist psto?

Re:Printable version

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I was (snarkily) referring to the feature of the Safari web browser that consolidates multipage articles into a single article automagically. I don't even use Safari all that often, just found it handy in this case. Do you really need a link to download Safari?

Re:Printable version

[somersault]

No, but we didn't know that Safari had that feature.. I didn't even use Safari when I had a Mac, and I'm sure as hell not installing it on Linux (especially not if it relies on WINE)..

Re:Printable version

[Sparks23]

Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in, and there's the Readability add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability, or the Instapaper service.

To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.

Re:Printable version

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

No, but we didn't know that Safari had that feature.

I actually think this is a big problem for software development. I often find myself talking to developers who only really use one OS and often only very specific tools on that OS. As such, there is a lack of general knowledge about what cool features have been invented by others and it sometimes takes many years for something really cool to make its way from one app on one platform to other mainstream apps on other platforms.

Nowadays there are plug-ins for Firefox and probably other browsers to do the same thing as the Safari feature, but despite the usefullness, most people have ever heard of them. It's a failing that is hard to remedy. I consider being a multi-OS user useful not only in being more versatile, but because it is informative about what I'm missing the rest of the time, some of which can be solved with a little setup.

Re:Printable version

[Requiem18th]

Firefox's Autopager does the same thing, I guess. Haven't tried Safari since leaving Windows.

Re:Printable version

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Hopefully this will kill those multipage articles.

Re:Printable version

[somersault]

Oh, I'm a "multi OS" user too, I just didn't like Safari from the outset. I did of course try it out, I think it was just slow and incompatible with stuff at that point (maybe 3-4 years ago), compared to Firefox at least.

I'm sure I saw /. posters mentioning plugins to do this before too - not even recently, this was years ago. Perhaps it was a greasemonkey script. I prefer not to install too much guff though, I just use an adblocker. Perhaps browsers are sandboxed better these days so that plugins don't cause so many crashes, but they still must slow things down a little. Since I do most of my browsing on this netbook, it's best to keep things streamlined where I can.

Re:Printable version

[freedumb2000]

There are plugins for this in Chrome, which last time I checked weren't without some imperfections though. Also great for reading forums etc.

Re:Printable version

[TheRaven64]

Hey, I use a Mac and Safari is my main browser, and I didn't know Safari could do that! I just clicked on TFA to test it, and now I feel annoyed that I gave Neil McAllister a page view.

Re:Printable version

[gknoy]

Here's wishing I knew how to make Opera do the same ...

Re:Printable version

[Rockoon]

AutoPagerize for Opera should work. Havent tried it myself. It claims to only inline the next page when you reach the end of the article.

Re:Printable version

[tehcyder]

As no-one uses Safari, you should have been more specific. Also, I am not going to download some piece of shit software from Apple because of one feature which shouldn't need to be there in the first place. If I come across a stupid article spread one sentence per page, I just don't read it. You shouldn't encourage the fuckers.

All about features, not stability

[Animats]

(Read the print version of the article on one page. It's one of those "short article spread across many ad-heavy pages" crap sites.)

The article just compares the feature lists. It's not clear if either is better from a bug standpoint. A big problem with OpenOffice is that it tends to crash too much. (Especially, for some reason, when exiting.) Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

It's encouraging that LibreOffice is around. I've been using OpenOffice since 1.0, and haven't used a version of Microsoft Word later than Word 97. OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The article just compares the feature lists.

This isn't true at all. While their testing was very limited they notes several bugs where the specs claimed a feature would work, but did not actually function or was inaccessible.

Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.

OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.

Agreed. It really needs some good paid developers from Canonical or Redhat or someone to do proper usability assessment and testing, and then rework the UI and other relevant parts of the code.

Re:All about features, not stability

[jfengel]

The main thing I've seen is that it seems to open a lot faster. That's just anecdotal; I haven't used a stopwatch and I only have a limited set of machines. But I'm used to downloaded Excel spreadsheets taking tens-of-seconds to open, especially the first time. (I don't like fast-starters because they make the already interminable Windows startup even slower.)

Re:All about features, not stability

[icebike]

Downloading a JRE doesn't seem that big of a deal. Most people have that installed already.

The review specifically stated:

I found no difference between the two offerings either in performance or stability. Neither crashed on me, even when handling documents designed to put productivity apps through the wringer.

That is my assessment as well. I've never seen any crashes on either version.

I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways.

But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".

Re:All about features, not stability

[tverbeek]

"I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways." Sounds like a description of Microsoft Office to me.

Re:All about features, not stability

[magus_melchior]

Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

The article says that LO does support Java, but you need to download it separately (licensing issues?). Certain features (database for one) require Java, but for basic Word/Excel clone stuff, you probably don't need it.

Re:All about features, not stability

[GameboyRMH]

If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.

Can it not run with OpenJDK? IIRC that's what I installed to get it running on my Ubuntu laptop...

Re:All about features, not stability

[jvin248]

I find LO a bit better at handling MSOffice open document format (.docx, .xlsx, etc) than OOo. Downside is presentation minimizer that I use a lot (all those MSO users I work with can't seem to minimize .ppt's) only works on OOo and not LO, yet. I find LO more stable than OOo.

I have an install of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS that I removed OOo and replaced with LO, so no dependency issues since it was all taken care of with the original OOo install and stayed for LO.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Can it not run with OpenJDK? IIRC that's what I installed to get it running on my Ubuntu laptop...

I don't know as I haven't tried. Google says there are some fairly serious bugs doing so, but it may depend upon your OS.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Machtyn]

I was surprised that I had to get the JRE after installing LO on Windows 7. That was just to open LO's Writer.

Re:All about features, not stability

[somersault]

What improvements were hated? About the biggest complaint I saw was them moving the min/max/close buttons to the opposite side of the task bar. I seriously don't even notice, and that's despite having to remote desktop into Windows a lot of the time.

Of course, I basically always close windows in Linux with ctrl-w or ctrl-q anyway, so they could get rid of all the buttons and I wouldn't give a toss.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways. But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".

Comical, but fair. User interface design is so often done poorly in the computing world that calling terrible usability amateurish is not really fair. Individual mileage may vary. I'm, perhaps, overly harsh because I use OS X as my default desktop, only resorting to Ubuntu or Windows when I need specific software for that platform or that only runs well on that platform, or when testing on multiple platforms. As such, most of the software I use inherits a lot of good usability defaults from the dev tools and native UI widgets. OpenOffice has always ignored OS X native UI, however, concentrating instead on consistency across platforms and ignoring both the UI issues this causes and the functionality offered by OS X to native programs, which OO and LibreOffice cannot use (system services for example). This makes it seem like a usability disaster on OS X, when in truth it is just another poor to average usability program, badly ported to an OS it was clearly not designed for.

As for OO versus MS Office, I had a fun interaction at work where a co-worker was demanding MS Office because they did not like the supplied OO. When they obtained it, it was the new version with a completely different interface than they were used to and they ended up switching back in short order. Personally, I've used both about the same amount and curse at both equally. Word probably takes the cake for hellish UI design choices, but Calc is pretty close.

Re:All about features, not stability

[somersault]

Well, since 2007 anyway.

Re:All about features, not stability

[PopeRatzo]

The main thing I've seen is that it seems to open a lot faster

Which one opens faster?

Anybody reading this, can you spare me from having to read the fucking article and just tell me if LibreOffice is better than OpenOffice? I'm in the middle of Dead Space 2 and I don't have time to mess about with reading articles.

Thank you.

Re:All about features, not stability

[jfengel]

I found LibreOffice to open faster than the previous version of OpenOffice. But like I said, anecdotal.

Summary of the article: On a feature basis, they're practically identical. Lots of small changes that matter if you care about that particular bug/tiny feature but no dramatic reason to switch.

Re:All about features, not stability

[melikamp]

I use calc only, and I found that LO already fixed some small annoying shit, like erasing cell content instead of bringing up a wizard when I press Delete. Small things like that in UI, and numerous improvements under the hood make LO a clear winner in my eyes already.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Tubal-Cain]

I don't know if anyone's complained about it, but they're making their netbook interface Unity the default desktop. It was still very much a beta when I was trying it out last year, but it shows some promise. Needs a real menu, if you ask me.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Don't kid yourself about OSX. You may like it, but it has it's own share of UI disasters. Some like having the Trash and Eject be the same UI target were a dumb idea from day one. Some, like having all of the menus at the top of the screen made sense when we were on low resolution single screen systems, but are detriments in multi-monitor high resolutions systems, and some of them are brand new bonehead decisions like choose to use a green plus for a button that will shrink the screen.

Re:All about features, not stability

[cforciea]

I personally am enraged every time I hit enter on an application and it sets me up for renaming the icon. I mean, really? That's what I am going to do so frequently that it deserves one of the biggest buttons on my keyboard? That's what passes for intuitive?

Re:All about features, not stability

[freedumb2000]

Interestingly, LO crashes randomly when saving a document while OO does not. Maybe it's a fluke on my system, but that's how it is. Drove me crazy until I decided to try OO, not believing that it would actually help. Using OS X SL.

Re:All about features, not stability

[icebike]

Well, to be fair, the author didn't text on OS X, he only tested on Windows.

I run OL on both Linux and Windows and have not seen this crash on save, but others in this thread have reported it.

Re:All about features, not stability

[TheRaven64]

Command-o will open the selected thing. This is consistent with every other place on OS X, where command-o means open. And renaming applications may not be common, but it's one of the most common activities on files in general in the Finder, so yes it does make sense for it to be one of the largest keys on your keyboard.

Re:All about features, not stability

[TheRaven64]

LibreOffice incorporates all of Novell's patches. A lot of these were related to improving startup time, mostly by turning static initialisers into lazy initialisation, but also by tweaking the linkage so the dynamic loader doesn't have to spend so much time resolving symbols. Most of the others are related to improving MS compatibility, and depending on who you listen to are either vital to adoption or are a MS-spawned patent trap.

Re:All about features, not stability

[gad_zuki!]

>Downloading a JRE doesn't seem that big of a deal. Most people have that installed already.

Its a huge deal. Most people don't have it installed. There's very little reason for more end users to have java.

On top if it, if you read about the main vectors for malware, you'll see java vulnerabilities top the list. Having to install java and increasing your attack surface by a ridiculous degree isn't worth it for any office product. Imagine if MS forced people to install silverlight, slashdot would be having conniptions, but java is okay? No thanks. I don't let friends and family have java or use IE or Adobe Reader. Their malware levels are almost non-existent now. Funny how that works.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I personally am enraged every time I hit enter on an application and it sets me up for renaming the icon. I mean, really? That's what I am going to do so frequently that it deserves one of the biggest buttons on my keyboard? That's what passes for intuitive?

It is actually funny you mention that because that exact feature is why a colleague of mine (technical writer) switched to OS X from Windows. It was painful to rename large lists of files using just the keyboard on Windows. She actually had someone teach her to use the DOS shell just for that capability. When she saw me perform the operation on a few files on one of the office Macs she decided that one feature was so important she was willing to switch OS's to get it.

I suppose one could just as easily ask, who launches icons from the windowing GUI using the keyboard, but not using Spotlight? Who does it so often that a key combination rather than a keypress slows them down?

Re:All about features, not stability

[roju]

No kidding. What about Cmd-Down says "execute"?

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Fit's law is a joke. In a best case scenario, the amount of time it would save is small enough to be statistical noise. For someone who has never touched a mouse before, you might see some benefit, but it only takes days for someone to become proficient enough with a mouse that it loses it's benefits. In multi screen modes you not only have the longer distance, but you also have to move to a second screen that is not necessarily the same size and shape. It also requires that you reorient your vision form one screen to another to find your place. After all, not every click is going to be in the corner. It also has the problem of the user having to figure out what window the menu applies to. That more than consumes the tiny amounts of time and effort that would be saved with Fit's Law. It could be argued that the saved real estate was worth the drawbacks of the single menu for all applications, but real estate is less valuable now than the benefit of clearly associating a menu with a window.

I don't know what you are talking about Linux requiring the movement of the mouse in specific patterns.

As for symbols, Windows has a picture of what it will do. One big window for full screen where you can see only one window. Two smaller windows for the mode that lets you see more than one windows. Clearly, there was at least an attempt to have icons that had some kind of association with what would happen. I personally think they did a perfectly fine job with them. OSX on the other hand used a symbol, that means exactly the opposite of what the button does half the time. Plus means add or more. There is never a case where a plus symbol should be used to shrink a screen. It is worse than arbitrary. It is wrong. A squiggly line, a # symbol, an picture of an apple, would all be fine if meaningless. A plus symbol is not meaningless, it is wrong. Then the color choice gets added to that. Apple is using Green, Yellow, and Red. When these colors are put together in a row, it is a reference to a stop light. The fact that red, the universal symbol for stop is used to close the window (some times the app, but that is a whole other UI screwup). Using Green along side of it in a Green Yellow Red combination assigns 'Go' to the color. That means the green plus has the symbol 'Go More' or 'Go Bigger'. That is simply not what the button does. The OSX symbol isn't "not easily interpretable". A green plus assigned to a window is very clearly marked. It is just that the button doesn't do what it is marked to do. Sure, you can learn that it is labeled badly, just as we can learn that hamburgers are not made with ham. It doesn't make it correct.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Flea of Pain]

I don't let friends and family have java or use IE or Adobe Reader.

But when their typewriter breaks a key, boy does all hell break loose ;)

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Yes, that's it the parent posters point. Launching the application using the keyboard is a pain unless you basically use the GUI as if it were a CLI.

Re:All about features, not stability

[somersault]

Ah yes, forgot about that. Still, it'll be interesting to see what they come up with, and there's always Debian, Mint, etc for those who don't like the directions Ubuntu are heading in. So far all the things they've been doing have seemed like real improvements to me though. I'm willing to keep giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Re:All about features, not stability

[mug funky]

conveniently ignored the part about command-o being two relatively small keypresses versus one really big one?

you could flip that and say that the single (granted small, out of the way key) keypress F2 for renaming in windows is probably quite a good solution.

i find renaming to be an annoying task in OSX. the double-click speed mixed with my own impatience means it's pot luck as to whether i rename the next file or open it.

removal of all eject and restart buttons is a big problem. as is the steadfast, bloody-minded and consistent refusal to get out of the '80s and put at least a second button on their mouse. instead they have 1 big button that covers the entire surface of the thing, and after a week of use the thing's so fucked it can't tell if you pressed the left or right side unless you place your fingers in ergonomically painful positions.

the nipple-mouse does not cut it - the trackball thing is so flimsy that on the mac i use most frequently i can't even scroll up (but i can scroll down and side-by-side). don't even fucking get me started on the clicking and dragging by clutching the sides with my thumb-and-weakest-finger causing shooting pain up the sides of my arm. macs are used for design! who would have guessed people would click-and-drag quite often?

a lack of "process priority" in their equivalent of windows' task manager is a big pain - having to use terminal and sudo renice to perform a task i do several times an hour on a PC.

how about having no menu button on the goddamned "pro cinema HD" displays. try doing colour critical work where 2 identical monitors have the same brightness setting (the only setting you have control on the actual screen), running the exact same colour profile, can look completely different, with no remedy in software to correct for it without massive and egregious loss of precision. nothing worse than having a client look between 2 different monitors, and 1 different broadcast monitor and ask you which one they're meant to be looking at.

okay, i'm ranting now. but Mac sucks at UI no matter how much the fanboys squeal that they're actually not stupid, they're advaaanced.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Nowadays, when you start dragging a removable disk, the trash can turns into an eject symbol. I still don't use it, it's easier to right click on the icon and select the "eject" option.

Still bad behavior. It is still the same target. Changing the icon doesn't fix it. This is clearly a case of a really bad UI decision even for it's time, but because Apple tries to foster an image of UI perfection, they simply cannot admit that it was a REALLY bad UI design. So, instead of just admitting that it was bad and getting rid of it, they "Enhance" it, and leave their system with eject and trash as being the same UI target. Which leaves us with my original claim that it is a poor UI element that was a bad design from the beginning.

It makes absolute sense given the Macintosh paradigm of window = document. You can still see the menu bar even when there are no documents open. Windows has the paradigm window = application which means that, to see the menu bar you must have always have a document open or an empty window.

Your going to have to supply a citation from Apple for me to buy that one. You are the first I have heard claim that. 100% of people who I have ever heard claim that the single menu was best, claimed that it was because of 'Fit's Law'. A meme with dubious validity to begin with. If your claim is correct, then I apparently missed just how bad the very paradigm of the Mac is. A chess game is not a document. Neither are a ton of other applications. That sounds like a pretty poor rationalization for keeping a UI design element in place when the advancement of hardware turns an asset into a liability.

It doesn't shrink the screen, or even the document window it is attached to necessarily. It always makes the window exactly big enough to show all the content of the document (or as much content as is possible given the size of the screen). This usually involves making the window bigger.

That would be dandy if that is what it did, but it doesn't. Sometimes it goes full screen, sometimes it resizes to 'optimal', sometimes it shrinks the screen, and sometimes it completely reconfigures the layout of the application and puts it into a completely different UI mode. The functionality of the button it totally inconsistent, and frequently does exactly the opposite of what a green plus means. Every Apple apologist tries to make the claim that the green button is 'optimal size for the application'. I have a Mac right here on my desk that empirically proves that you and every other person that makes that claim is simply wrong. I would assume that you have a Mac, right? Go ahead and try it. Pick any application and open it. Now press the green plus. What happens? It either grew or shrank the screen. If it shrank, then you can now know that you were wrong. If it grew, press the green button again... I'll wait.... What happened? Ooooohhhh.... That's right. The screen shrank. Pressing the green button made your screen shrink.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Grishnakh]

Yep, I'm a Kubuntu user, and I'm probably going to switch to Mint (KDE edition) soon, as soon as they put out their new version with KDE 4.6 (which appears to fix a lot of the bugs and annoyances with KDE4.5). Ubuntu has never treated KDE very well, but the huge software repositories available to Ubuntu/Debian distros makes it hard to switch back to Suse.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Grishnakh]

just as we can learn that hamburgers are not made with ham.

Hamburgers have as much to do with ham as the name of the city Phuket, Thailand has to do with fucking, or the Indian surname "Dikshit" has to do with penises and fecal matter. The name "hamburger" has nothing to do with ham; that's just an accident where the name of the German city Hamburg happens to share three letters with an English word for pig meat.

The word "hamburger" comes from the city Hamburg, as the people who invented it came from there, and was originally called a "Hamburg beefsteak" or similar, and hamburger means someone from Hamburg, just as "wiener" means someone from Wien (Vienna), and "frankfurter" means someone from Frankfurt. Hamburg was originally named "Hammaburg", with "burg" meaning a fortified town, and the origin of "hamma" is unknown and lost in ancient history.

Re:All about features, not stability

[mcrbids]

Curiosity got me in reading this. I've just never noticed much, so I tried OO.o on my Fedora Core 14 laptop, and it took 2.5 seconds. To be fair, this is not a "lightweight" laptop - A Dell Precision M4500, with 4-core i7 and 8 GB of RAM.

Still, 2.5 seconds is by no means slow.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Lehk228]

mac hasn't been "for design" since os9, maybe os8, now it's for college students, aspiring writers, and people who worry more about what other people think about their computer then how useful the computer is.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Lehk228]

the windows paradigm provides instant feedback as to what the user has open and running, back in school (the last time i had the misfortune of being forced to use apple software for any length of time) it was very common to find machines in a barely functional state because students would leave nearly every application on the system running in the background with no natural indication that there were many apps running.

windows 7 has moved backwards in this regard by making programs pinned to the task bar mix with and look nearly the same (sans buttony border) as open but minimized windows.

Re:All about features, not stability

[evilviper]

Having java installed doesn't magically put you in danger. The only place where java increases your attack profile is when its running as a browser plug in, and that is easy to disable without removing java.

Now, if you just don't know how to do it, and refuse to learn, that's a different issue entirely.

Re:All about features, not stability

[falconwolf]

i find renaming to be an annoying task in OSX. the double-click speed mixed with my own impatience means it's pot luck as to whether i rename the next file or open it.

I have no problem holding down the apple key while clicking then selecting "Get info" to rename files. Actually if I have up to 10 files to rename I find that that is faster.

removal of all eject and restart buttons is a big problem.

For you not for me.

as is the steadfast, bloody-minded and consistent refusal to get out of the '80s and put at least a second button on their mouse. instead they have 1 big button that covers the entire surface of the thing

Again, for you but not for me. I do the same on my Mac as I did on my Windows and Linux PCs, use a keypress-click combo. For instance before Slashdot started using the new UI when I made a post I held down "alt" when I clicked to open a new tab in Windows, well on my Mac I held down the apple key. Or when I google, I'll open links the same way.

Of course that does not mean I can not use a two button mouse, but I don't. Instead just as when I used Windows I use a two button Trackball.

okay, i'm ranting now.

Yeap, your whole post was a rant.

Falcon

Re:All about features, not stability

[falconwolf]

Interestingly, LO crashes randomly when saving a document while OO does not. Maybe it's a fluke on my system, but that's how it is. Drove me crazy until I decided to try OO, not believing that it would actually help. Using OS X SL.

No wonder, if you're using it in OSX you're really using X Windows. I use the native Mac port of OO, NeoOffice, and the only problem I've had with it is that I think it takes too long to launch. That may change after I increase my RAM from 2GB to 4GB but I don't think so, it was slow when I got my Mac more than 3 years ago.

As for OSX SL, I'm still using Leopard as my primary OS. I installed SL on an external drive to test it, once testing is done I'll install it on the internal drive. Actually I plan on replacing the HDD with a larger one like the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive . I'd rather get a bigger drive but having a Solid State Hybrid Drive may be faster.

Falcon Falcon

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Yeah, that has to be the case for my sentence to make any sense.

Re:All about features, not stability

[jabelli]

windows 7 has moved backwards in this regard by making programs pinned to the task bar mix with and look nearly the same (sans buttony border) as open but minimized windows.

Which you can fix of course by unpinning everything from the task bar and creating a new toolbar and call it perhaps "Quick Launch" and put all the applications there instead of pinning them.

Re:All about features, not stability

[dudpixel]

so are you saying that right throughout OSX, the ENTER key is never used to execute anything?

seems like you're a little too blind to see that the original complaint was actually valid.

Re:All about features, not stability

[dudpixel]

I'm sorry, in what world does "I am so used to OSX I dont notice myself doing this thing and so it is easy" become an answer to "new users will find this difficult and unintuitive"??

The original post complained that some things were not logical or not intuitive.

So explaining why they work for you because you've always done it that way, is not actually a valid response. You didn't address any of the issues, except to say that if you do it enough it becomes habit. If you use this line of argument, then there is no such thing as a bad UI.

Re:All about features, not stability

[falconwolf]

I'm sorry, in what world does "I am so used to OSX I dont notice myself doing this thing and so it is easy" become an answer to "new users will find this difficult and unintuitive"??

In what world is MS Windows easier to use? Not this one, or the one where Macs are growing faster. Of course Yale is too uppity.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/tco-new-research-finds-macs-in-the-enterprise-easier-cheaper-to-manage-than-windows-pcs/6294

The original post complained that some things were not logical or not intuitive.

And I stated those were matters of personal preference. Do you have scientific studies showing one GUI is better than others? Or are you letting your emotions dictate your reactions?

Falcon

Re:All about features, not stability

[jfengel]

Yes, my computers are considerably more elderly and clunky, so I notice it more.

Actually, it's mostly telling me it's time for a new computer.

Re:All about features, not stability

[lennier]

Don't kid yourself about OSX. You may like it, but it has it's own share of UI disasters. ... Some, like having all of the menus at the top of the screen made sense when we were on low resolution single screen systems, but are detriments in multi-monitor high resolutions system.

I used to dislike the Apple menubar at the top of the screen, but since seeing Office 2011 on OSX just the other day, I had a sudden epiphany:

Taking the existence of the menu bar away from the control of applications means application designers can't remove it just because, like a cat, they decided to chase a shiny ribbon instead that day.

(I suppose Microsoft could have just pulled all the entries off the Office 2011 menubar and left it with just the 'Apple', but as it happened, they chose not to do that because it would have pointed out just how annoying they were.)

I so wish we could enforce something like this on Windows.

Re:All about features, not stability

[lennier]

mac hasn't been "for design" since os9, maybe os8, now it's for college students, aspiring writers, and people who worry more about what other people think about their computer then how useful the computer is.

Cough. Tell that to all the designers and design schools I know. Macs are only for design in the IT world I'm aware of. How's life in yours?

Re:All about features, not stability

[jrumney]

If I wanted to use just the keyboard to rename files, I'd use Emacs. When Finder or Explorer get support for regular expressions, search and replace, and keyboard macros with auto-increment counters, I might reconsider.

Re:All about features, not stability

[lennier]

I suppose one could just as easily ask, who launches icons from the windowing GUI using the keyboard, but not using Spotlight? Who does it so often that a key combination rather than a keypress slows them down?

Interesting you should say that.

It's only my anecdotal observation, but whenever I compare the Windows to Mac users I know, I always get the impression that the Mac users are very keyboard-shy compared to the Windows ones, and less efficient.

The Windows users will use a very fluid mix of mouse and keyboard gestures, but the Mac users tend to use mouse-only gestures, and generally take a much longer time to get anything done. In fact it's painful for me to sit behind a Mac user and watch them deliberately left-click, drag, move, for about ten seconds when it would take about two accelerator keys. I see their hands all bunched up in claws from the intensity of extended delicate mousing and the muscle concentration it requires and think 'that can't be healthy'.

Maybe I just have a poor selection of non-proficient Mac users to observe? But they seem to be the 'power user' type to me.

Re:All about features, not stability

[lennier]

On top if it, if you read about the main vectors for malware, you'll see java vulnerabilities top the list.

Indeed. Isn't it funny how when Java first launched, its big promise was 'no potential for malware because it runs in a sandbox'?

And that was way before the big malware wave. 1996 was such a kinder, more innocent time. Six years before SQL Slammer and three before even Melissa, and Java's security seemed too paranoid.

Sigh. I don't really miss those years, but...

Re:All about features, not stability

[lennier]

Having java installed doesn't magically put you in danger. The only place where java increases your attack profile is when its running as a browser plug in, and that is easy to disable without removing java.

Now, if you just don't know how to do it, and refuse to learn, that's a different issue entirely.

There's 'don't know how', and then there's 'your system will helpfully automagically revert to an insecure configuration every time you apply a purported security upgrade'.

Yes, you can bash your will into many things if you hit them with blunt system configuration editors hard enough, but life is generally easier when the tools you use don't actively work against you.

Re:All about features, not stability

[cforciea]

You are using two different (albeit related) senses of "open" interchangeable, which is only intuitive on paper. When I am in an application, command+o opens a dialogue that allows me to select a file to open using the current domain-specific software I have in the foreground. My file browser is not a piece of software that I want to open a file into. It is much more akin to a CLI, where I expect the enter key to execute my previous input. By your logic, I could make a web browser that opens your default search provider whenever I hit ctrl+f on a PC and call it intuitive because I am looking to "find" something, even though most of my users will expect from other analogous applications that it should open a dialogue for doing string matching on my current window.

Re:All about features, not stability

[cforciea]

One of my complaints about the top menu bar is lack of feedback. I occasionally find myself digging in a file menu that is not menu for the window I meant it to be. I can click another non-overlapping window, or even click the desktop, and there is no massive, immediate change that indicates that I am interacting with a window I had no intention of touching. While this is not necessarily a huge issue, it outweighs an artificial restriction on UI for third party applications, in my mind, as a benefit. I can just avoid the applications that abuse the ability to have non-standard menu bars and get the best of both worlds.

Re:All about features, not stability

[drinkypoo]

Its a huge deal. Most people don't have it installed.

[citation needed]

There's very little reason for more end users to have java.

There's still loads of Java out there. It's in HP print servers for example. (And still causing problems.)

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It's only my anecdotal observation, but whenever I compare the Windows to Mac users I know, I always get the impression that the Mac users are very keyboard-shy compared to the Windows ones, and less efficient. Maybe I just have a poor selection of non-proficient Mac users to observe? But they seem to be the 'power user' type to me.

That is an odd observation. Novice users on any system will be slow and avoid advanced UI features, but I certainly know plenty of expert Mac users that make heavy use of the keyboard. I find the keyboard use on the Mac to be significantly better than Windows when using a variety of software. First, every function is keyboard accessible, not just a subset as with most windows software. Second, the CLI interaction with GUI programs allows a lot of regexp heavy lifting and piping. It may be that I haven't spent enough time with powershell, but partly I blame MS for reinventing the wheel instead of implementing a compatible CLI that leverages the millions of man hours of existing user experience.

But all that is just MY personal observation. I work with a lot of very expert Mac users, some of whom you see quoted in security themed articles here on a regular basis. Who would have thought in the old days that Macs would take over as the most popular workstation for security pros eh? It boggles the mind.

In addition to my informal observation, I've run a number of formal usability testing sessions for different software, including many sorts of users on different OS's, all filmed and categorized and broken down by every failed interface action. The amount of fail for all users on the Windows OS is staggeringly bad. I've been in roundtable discussions with dozens of usability experts and the consensus I've seen is that MS probably does formal usability testing, but that the problems they find are often ignored and random changes are introduced either by engineering or sales, late in the game, with no regard for usability.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Fit's law is a joke. In a best case scenario, the amount of time it would save is small enough to be statistical noise.

Assuming you mean Fitt's law, [citation fucking needed]. Every couple of years another usability grad student revisits Fitt's law in some testing to see if it really holds up in the real world. It is so well supported by now you might as well be arguing against evolution. If you had ever in your life picked up an HCI journal, or even taken a few serious university courses I can't imagine you making this assertion.

I don't know what you are talking about Linux requiring the movement of the mouse in specific patterns.

Use it on a daily basis for a while and it becomes obvious. I'm not going into a lengthy explanation here though.

Clearly, there was at least an attempt to have icons that had some kind of association with what would happen.

Yup, they made an effort. Then you sit a user down, show them the icon and ask them what it means in context. Rearrange them and ask again. Most users will tell you the meaning is completely different, because they just know you click the middle one to do that and the symbols have no meaning to them.

A green plus assigned to a window is very clearly marked. It is just that the button doesn't do what it is marked to do.

It does what it is marked to do well enough. I've actually seen a study on this very topic. The problem with this user interface element is that it doesn't do what Windows does, no more no less. As a power user, I appreciate the functionality. As a usability engineer, I bemoan the wretched choice of the designers in giving power users more functionality, dependent upon the app designer, or being less confusing to "switchers".

...just as we can learn that hamburgers are not made with ham. It doesn't make it correct.

That's a bit of a non sequitur. By the same argument, we could say Seattle is incorrectly named because people there do stand up and are not always seated. Good thing we've learned or something... what was your point again?

Re:All about features, not stability

[marcosdumay]

They had that problem before 2007 too. But as everybody already had some 10 years of trainning on their interface, they mainly got over with it.

Re:All about features, not stability

[somersault]

Hmm.. I don't remember feeling it was an issue more than any other office suites I've used (stuff like ClarisWorks on Mac when I was a kid, and more recently OpenOffice). I find the traditional menus a lot easier to browse through quickly than the ribbon though, they're much more compact, and I find vertical lists much more pleasant for glancing through quickly. Plus, I really do think the previous menus had more sense to them. Even when I'd never done something before, it wasn't that hard to figure it out, but the ribbon is just plain annoying.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yes, that's it the parent posters point. Launching the application using the keyboard is a pain unless you basically use the GUI as if it were a CLI.

How is using arrow keys, then cmd-o more akin to a CLI than using enter? It's just a different choice. Also, why is bringing the power of the CLI to a GUI a bad thing? Spotlight is similar to tab completion, but using a nice GUI so users don't have to launch a CLI or worry about paths. I guess we have very different interpretations of what a "pain" is.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If I wanted to use just the keyboard to rename files, I'd use Emacs.

Umm, Emacs? Why not the bash shell? Why do you need a text editor when the CLI supports regexps? As for using the GUI, spotlight supports regexp and for renaming Automator does as well, so you don't need the CLI, you can use the included GUI tools easily.

Re:All about features, not stability

[mug funky]

re-read your last line and apply it to yourself.

most of this boils down to preference, but a lot of my points (ie. the ones you had no answer to, funnily enough) come down to basic ergonomics. apple would be a better company for paying attention to such concerns, rather than unleashing the fanbois onto the person that raises the question.

my post was tl;dr, but i stopped myself. i could have gone further.

but then... i could do the same about windows. and linux.

what i don't get is the fact that apple fans seem to think that having their OS derided automatically means that person is automatically saying their OS is better... that does not necessarily follow.

just have a bit more of an open mind (GPL v2?).

and if you insist on defending mac design and ergonomics, you might start by addressing my above concerns (how on earth can you defend the case of the mighty-mouse scroll-nipple-and-single-massive-useless-button and the monitors that you cannot calibrate except in software?). being used to using both hands to perform an action most people are used to performing with one hand does not cut it. my wife has CP on her right side, and as such cannot use function-keys in conjunction with a mouse. if apple is all about accessibility, how on earth do they defend that?

"anyone can use a mac, so long as they have 100% use of both hands"

Re:All about features, not stability

[dudpixel]

In what world is MS Windows easier to use? Not this one, or the one where Macs are growing faster. Of course Yale is too uppity.

You claim below that it is based on personal preference. Most of the world considers Windows to be easier to use than any alternative.

Macs selling faster...hmmm I have a problem with that. See, mac came out before windows...and windows has like 90% of the desktop market...which by definition means windows sells a LOT more over shorter time...which means windows sells faster. Maybe the iphone/ipad craziness has turned that around a little nowadays, but lets just wait and see if it leads anywhere.

The original post complained that some things were not logical or not intuitive.

And I stated those were matters of personal preference. Do you have scientific studies showing one GUI is better than others? Or are you letting your emotions dictate your reactions?

Your post didn't confirm anything about it being personal preference, and neither did the parent post deny that. You may have felt it was implicit, but I disagree.

I agree it is about preference...but that wasn't the point of either of the previous posts.

Re:All about features, not stability

[incer]

Neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice use X11 anymore on a Mac.

Re:All about features, not stability

[falconwolf]

And I stated those were matters of personal preference. Do you have scientific studies showing one GUI is better than others? Or are you letting your emotions dictate your reactions?

re-read your last line and apply it to yourself.

Not only did I not do that but I actually provided links as well as asked for links to scientific studies concluding Windows was more intuitive and logical. Of course it's too difficult to provide what I asked for, but easy to ridicule those who say what you disagree with.

what i don't get is the fact that apple fans seem to think that having their OS derided automatically means that person is automatically saying their OS is better... that does not necessarily follow.

It's no different for Apple opponents.

and if you insist on defending mac design and ergonomics, you might start by addressing my above concerns (how on earth can you defend the case of the mighty-mouse scroll-nipple-and-single-massive-useless-button and the monitors that you cannot calibrate except in software?

But I did address them. Just because you can't, or didn't, read my post does not mean I didn't. But as a matter of fact, Apple's Mighty Mouse and Magic Mouse "acts as one button or two" and "if you want the functionality of a two-button mouse, that’s easy, too." And of course you're not locked into using an Apple mouse, I have a two button Logitech Trackball connected to my Mac. And before I got my Mac, I used it with my Windows PCs and my Linux PC. But if you have to have a two-button mouse then Apple sells them too. As for calibrating Apple monitors, many other monitors can only be calibrated in software too.

my wife has CP on her right side, and as such cannot use function-keys in conjunction with a mouse.

And as stated above she doesn't have to. There is no need to defend that, what's defenseless is ignoring reality. Which you have been doing. Such as your comment:

"anyone can use a mac, so long as they have 100% use of both hands"

There is no need for two hands. Two button mice along with my Trackball are quite easy to use one handed. But go ahead and keep spreading FUD, just like a troll.

Falcon

Oh, one last thing. I am not an Apple fan. Sure I like Macs, the only Apple hardware I plan on buying, but my favorite computer/OS I have ever used is the Amiga. Next in line is Linux. Heck I even liked SGI's Irix more than I liked Apple's OS offering back then. Right now I'm preparing to install Ubuntu Linux on my Mac, to dual-boot. But I first want to swap the current HDD in it to a bigger drive. And for a monitor I'd rather get some else. Monitors from Dell, which use some of the same LCD panels as Apple does, are capable of deep color (30 bit) and cost less.

Re:All about features, not stability

[falconwolf]

Macs selling faster...hmmm I have a problem with that. See, mac came out before windows...and windows has like 90% of the desktop market...

Because Macs are made by only one company, Apple, while Microsoft sells Windows to anybody. I can go down to a store, buy MS Windows, and legally install it on the Mac I am typing this on. Heck I can buy Windows in an Apple store. Now I blame Apple for Macs not having a bigger market share, though it is growing. Fact is is Apple only gives potential buyers a limited selection of configurations and does not allow OSX to be installed on non-Apple hardware. I have heard, well read, a number of tymes right here on Slashdot people saying they would buy a Mac if they could get what they want, such as a mini tower costing around $1000. They will not spend twice that, which is what Mac Pros start at, and lower priced Macs and not really configurable and expandable. I have faulted Apple for this myself.

Your post didn't confirm anything about it being personal preference, and neither did the parent post deny that.

But I did, Mac's market share is growing because of personal choice. Buyers are not being required to buy one, though many PHBs require Windows PCs to be bought. Sure a smaller number of PHBs require Macs but there are less of them. Personally I advocate buying and using whatever gets the job done, at a low cost. In many cases Linux actually. Only in a few cases I know of does Linux fail. Print photography and custom in-house written software. But that's beyond the discussion.

I agree it is about preference...but that wasn't the point of either of the previous posts.

The post I was replying to when I said it was a preference made it out as a fact, therefore I stated it was a preference.

Falcon

Re:All about features, not stability

[falconwolf]

Oh, darn. I left out an important thing, the subject line: All about features, not stability. I switched from MS Windows to first a Linux tower then a Mac laptop. I did so specifically because I was sick and tired of my Windows PCs constantly crashing and needing to replace hardware and reinstall Windows and all the software I used. The only version of Windows I found stable was NT4, I still have the PC it's installed on below my desk. Unfortunately the PC has a DEC Alpha and I was unable to get much software installed. Ironically, well maybe not, one of the few applications I paid for I did install on it was Borland C++ builder. Most of the shareware/freeware software installed fine.

Falcon

so who won?

[Chaseshaw]

someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

Re:so who won?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Depends

Re:so who won?

[jbolden]

Well 6 words: Not different enough yet to matter.

Re:so who won?

[Anonymous Coward]

someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

yes

Re:so who won?

[Anonymous Coward]

emacs.

Re:so who won?

[TaoPhoenix]

Libre.

(Because Oracle is showing their evil ways, so go Libre and try to deal with the downsides, which appear to be minimal.)

Re:so who won?

[melikamp]

I-think-libreoffice-is-better-since-it-went-stable-because-they-fixed-icons-and-feature-wise-its-pretty-much-a-superset

Re:so who won?

[theheadlessrabbit]

someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

Open Office.org now belongs to Oracle. That should settle it for many FOSS fans.

Re:so who won?

[ubrgeek]

I'm _far_ from a power user with Office, but I can get around with it. Having used Office 2008 for the Mac for years (and not wanting/able to spend the money on the upgrade) I got tired of how slow and unresponsive it got. I started looking around for a replacement. I didn't want to pick up iWork as I kept hearing mixed things about it. I started playing around with Abiword but realized I might as well find something more comprehensive so I could ditch Office entirely. Based on a number of reviews/articles I decided to get LibreOffice (I didn't know about the Oracle angle, but I don't think it would have mattered to me) because the native OS X version looked the most polished (and I kept seeing things about porting OpenOffice to OS X - note: I don't know if those were links to binaries already compiled or instructions on how to do so. I really didn't want to mess around with anything other than, "Hey look. I double-clicked and it works.) Like I said, I'm not a power user but to date LibreOffice has done what I need. I've exported and imported Doc files via Word and Google Docs, haven't seemed to lose formatting (although I haven't tried track changes).

Re:so who won?

[DrgnDancer]

More than one word, but the article pretty much, I think, nails it: If you *have* to have support becasue of IT rules or something, OO.o is the only choice. Feature-wise they're all but I identical; but since most of the developers went to Libre, the smart money is on it improving more and faster as time goes on.

Re:so who won?

[GameboyRMH]

LibreOffice

--tl;dr friendly section ends here--

LibreOffice has everything that OO.org has, plus the Go-OO patches, minus an evil megacorporation at the reigns.

Re:so who won?

[Eponymous Coward]

Most of the developers went to Libre? Are you sure about that? The last I heard most of the development was still carried out in Germany by (former) StarOffice developers on Oracle's payroll. Has that changed?

Re:so who won?

[MartinJW]

Office

Re:so who won?

[camperdave]

someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

The one with the OneNote clone.

Re:so who won?

[PopeRatzo]

I didn't want to pick up iWork as I kept hearing mixed things about it.

"Mixed"? Who did you hear say anything good about it?

Re:so who won?

[asdf7890]

There's only one way to find out! FIGHT!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np6gyUb0E7o
(almost, but not quite, entirely off-topic I know - feel free to mod accordingly)

Re:so who won?

[arth1]

Which is also why I'm phasing out berkely/sleepycat db (and everything requiring it) and java.

Re:so who won?

[asdf7890]

Having used Office 2008 for the Mac for years

Many many years, or just two or three?!

Re:so who won?

[Jesus_666]

Well, Keynote is fairly nice. And, well, yeah. Keynote.

Re:so who won?

[TheRaven64]

I was going to ask the same thing. Most of the non-Sun developers went to Libre, but last statistics I saw said that 80% of the work was done by Sun people, about 10% by Novell, and 10% by everyone else combined. Did Oracle get rid of them all? I know LibreOffice has most of Novell's patches applied, but those have been available for a while. I've not seen any evidence that LibreOffice development is going faster than Novell's go-oo fork was previously.

Re:so who won?

[commodore6502]

>>>someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

"Free" (i.e. the one that is free)

Re:so who won?

[mhajicek]

Is that libre as in beer?

Re:so who won?

[Eunuchswear]

Nah, you should get rid of sleepycat 'cos its a fucking disaster.

Re:so who won?

[marcosdumay]

Lots of Sun developpers have quit recently, and went to working with Libre (if you RTFA you'd know) . Also, the fact that most of the development of OO was done by Sun developpers mean very little, since it was already forked because Sun didn't accept work done by third parties.

Re:so who won?

[marcosdumay]

There are three different situations:

1 - You really need a support contract, and have $9000+ to spare. You choose OO and keep an eye into LO in case it gets better.

2 - You really need a support contract, and doesn't have 9000+ to spare. You are toast, no support contract for you. But you can have LO.

3 - You don't really need a support contract. LO will save you $9000+ on support.

Besides that, the softwares are mainly the same on all fronts. If you are using Windows 7 and need to do a site wide installation and go with OO, you should contact Oracle and try to use their support. Then, you'll discover you are at situation 3, not 1, and do a sitewide installation of LO. That is the biggest difference, and applies only to a very unlikely situation.

Tl, dr

[Noughmad]

To summarize the summary of the summary: They're the same.

Re:Tl, dr

[H3xx]

To summarize the summary of the summary: They're the same.

So what if they're the same? Most source forks in the F/OSS world don't fall far from the tree, so to speak. Just look at what happened to Ethereal and Wireshark, or Netscape Navigator and Mozilla (the browser).

Give it time—LibreOffice is still a young'un yet and is still growing into its own. It already hates its parents so it's pretty much already an adolescent.

Re:Tl, dr

[Noughmad]

I have no problem with giving it time, and I use LibreOffice already. However, I don't think posting an article about their differences to Slashdot is worth it.

Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither has an equivalent to Outlook. I would think that the corporate lock-in to Outlook would be a strong message to OS writers that this is a big opportunity. I keep hearing from MS Office users that they'd ditch Office in a nanosecond if there was a competitor to Outlook, but since there isn't they don't bother moving to the OpenOffice/LibreOffice half-offering.

Re:Outlook

[jbolden]

There are lots. Zimbra in particular and many more.

Re:Outlook

[commodore6502]

Mozilla Thunderbird or Mozilla seaMonkey or Mozilla Classilla (mac) or Mozilla Spicebird are all alternatives to MS Outlook for email and usenet access.

Re:Outlook

[Desler]

He said "competitor" not half-assed attempts at cloning Outlook but with reduced functionality that somehow end up being buggier than Outlook is.

Re:Outlook

[kabloom]

Nobody's integrated an Outlook substitute into OpenOffice because Outlook is very different from the other office applications (which are all centered around creating documents of various types). Outlook is focused on connectivity, mainly email, address books, and calendars and the open source world has had a full stack for these capabilities for a long time. The recommended way to replace Outlook is with open protocols (IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV), but if you need Microsoft Exchange support, that's available too. One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.

Re:Outlook

[0racle]

Outlook is more then just a e-mail reader. Corporate support for Outlook and nothing else is from running Exchange as their collaboration suite. Nothing works better with Exchange than Outlook and replacing all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook is not easy.

Re:Outlook

[Voyager529]

*facepalm*

Zimbra, as has been mentioned before, is among the closest I've seen, but the list you wrote are NOT outlook substitutes.

I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature. If you're going to list Thunderbird as a viable alternative, you'll then by definition have to also list Windows Live Mail, since techncially it does do e-mail. ignoring user familiarity and data lock-in, here's what you're missing:

-Exchange support - yes, Exchange does POP3 and imap, but device sync, user policy and dozens of other backend features make it a staple in many server rooms. Again, there are FOSS alternatives, but "just because" isn't a good enough reason to ditch a perfectly working exchange server for a product many sysadmins don't know how to use (and "well they should" is a load of crap if their organization isn't using a non-exchange product already, and most of us have better things to do in our day like work on the actual Exchange server). There's also Blackberry server, OWA, and a swath of other things in the exchange ecosystem that the alternatives simply can't compete with yet.

-Calendar features - Sunbird is great, and has decent Thunderbird collaboration, but it's nowhere near as fluid. Meeting requests, room scheduling, and 'presence' features are just a few things off the top of my head that my office would crucify me for if I switched them to something else.

-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large.

Outlook has its issues (the fact that PST repair utilities exist is telling of one of them), but at the end of the day, I've yet to see an e-mail program of the FOSS variety that can compare to Outlook. Zimbra is pretty close, but it still comes up short - ask anyone in my office.

Re:Outlook

[icebike]

replacing all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook is not easy.

Nor even remotely necessary.

Re:Outlook

[commodore6502]

Your argument is reminiscent of those who argue LibreOffice and Ubuntu Linux can not be used as replacements for MS products either.

Re:Outlook

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Nor even remotely necessary.

While I agree with you. Try asking your boss if he/she can work without outlook/exchange. Or you could just try taking it away form the "suits" and see how fast you hit the unemployment lines.

Just to get back on topic. Here is a shout out for my favorite exchange replacement Kerio connect. http://www.kerio.com/connect/download

Re:Outlook

[GameboyRMH]

Evolution?

Re:Outlook

[BitZtream]

It is if you want to replace Outlook.

My company makes sells a service which can be used from within Outlook via an COM addon. A couple things I can tell you about Outlook users.

They aren't using it for email only. Those people quickly go switch to something that doesn't suck at reading email.

Sales people LIVE in Outlook. Contacts, notes, scheduling, reminders, workflow, document management, CRM and sales process are just the first and obvious things that come to mind. Every one of our customers that uses Outlook in a corporate environment has multiple plugins installed before we even get to them. These plugins make Outlook a client for some other system in their company and typically roll it all into one client reasonable well for the more well established plugins.

To put it bluntly, as much as Outlook sucks for Email, it is in a class all by itself when it comes to being a PIM for someone in a large company.

Nor even remotely necessary.

What you utterly fail to understand is while you think Outlook is an email client, you have absolutely no clue how people actually use it in the real world. You're just spouting off random crap because you think you understand what Outlook is used for, when in reality you don't. Its not a email client, its a PIM with a large feature set that you actually DO need to mimic if you expect people to use something else.

There isn't a Outlook/Exchange replacement, I've been looking for years. If it wasn't needed or people didn't want the features of Outlook, people would use something else in large companies ... but look around, it doesn't happen unless.

I haven't even touched on server side features.

With all that said, I freaking hate Outlook and Exchange, they are big over complicated piles of crap that need to be replaced by an open alternative, but thats not going to happen until the OSS world stops trying to change the way people use software like Outlook into their model and instead tries to make software that fits what those users want. That won't happen until someone can make money off it as its a very big project to take on.

Re:Outlook

[BitZtream]

When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, you tend to look at every problem as it it were a nail.

So why are you still doing so? You clearly don't know and haven't bothered to figure out why people use Outlook, yet you keep beating away with the hammer ...

Re:Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is reminiscent of those who argue LibreOffice and Ubuntu Linux can not be used as replacements for MS products either.

And yours is non-existent. Almost anyone working for a large organization can tell you how superior Outlook with Exchange is over the competing solutions (even pay ones like the awful Lotus Notes). Actually his synopsis of the situation is spot-on. Add in SharePoint and the integration gets even better.

Re:Outlook

[icebike]

Well, what I was getting at is there is a lot of functionality in Exchange/Outlook that is not needed, seldom used, designed for specific markets. Like every other Microsoft product, everything thrown at it sticks, and crappy functionality leads to code bloat.

Kerio and several others try to cut to the core needs. Instead of replacing everything they provide the essentials.

Re:Outlook

[Byzantine]

One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.

Maybe I'm alone here, but I won't use Evolution until it supports recurring tasks. And since that particular bug has gone unclosed for over eleven years, I'm not holding my breath. Well, not anymore.

Re:Outlook

[awpoopy]

We use Thunderbird, lightning and davmail to talk to exchange. It works great.

Re:Outlook

[tokul]

One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.

If Evolution does not improve their mailbox performance, forget about substituting Outlook or any other email program with it.

Re:Outlook

[Machtyn]

There are a few things that Microsoft does very well that the OSS world hasn't had the ability to duplicate. Excel is one. It flat out beats Calc for advanced functionality. I still use Calc. Outlook/Exchange for all the reasons the parent just detailed. I still use Thunderbird. I haven't really made an in-depth research for an OSS/FLOSS alternative for shared address books, notes, and calendars that integrate seemlessly with Thunderbird. I've seen a few that have made the attempt and haven't quite succeeded (yet), have I missed something?

Re:Outlook

[inglorion_on_the_net]

Exactly. The killer feature of Microsoft Outlook isn't email, but calendar functionality that works, is relatively easy to use, and interoperates with other Outlook users and a veritable horde of PDAs and cellphones. It seems this is only very slowly coming to the open source world, but I will be happy once it's there, because this functionality really does help me be more productive.

Re:Outlook

[Voyager529]

Okay so if you want to get technical it's not part of the RTM installer for Outlook, but adding Windows Desktop Search allows for indexing of the inbox. Search on an inbox without this is, as you point out, a glacial affair, but once indexed, WDS makes searching in Outlook a MUCH more useful tool.

Re:Outlook

[jbolden]

No I've used Thunderbird and mail.app. I was thinking the thick client not the web client.

Re:Outlook

[sintral]

That may well explain why it hasn't been done (successfully), but it isn't a good reason not to do it. Evolution is horrible on Windows and Thunderbird (while superior in my opinion) lacks certain functionality, OS integration, and provides a contrasting UI to the rest of any office suite.

Re:Outlook

[Doomdark]

And why would an office suite have an email reader? Just because Microsoft thought it a good idea doesn't mean it is...

Re:Outlook

[Voyager529]

I'm a bit of a pragmatist. Richard Stallman-like loyalty to FOSS be damned if my users can't do what they need to do for the company to be productive. Your NFS analogy falls flat because users can still store files and have share-level and file-level permissions added via NTFS. It doesn't support ZFS either, but if I wanted to, I could easily build a FreeNAS and have Windows talk to it with the users being none the wiser.

*YOUR* bubble involves the notion that users are going to notice what file system is on the computers they run. Given that half the staff has an iPhone or Android phone and the other half wants one of the above, neither of which come with file system management utilities out of the box, it's a safe bet that they won't care in the slightest. They *will*, however, care if I took away their ability to deal with large mailboxes and exchange meeting requests, or radically altered the process. While our internet service here is firewalled with a Linux appliance and our fax system soon will be, replacing our entire server infrastructure with Linux machines will do nothing but cost us money. How? our financial management software, for one, is Windows only. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean squat to a finance department that can NO LONGER DO THEIR JOBS because their financial management software no longer functions. Even if you were able to find me collaborative bookkeeping software that was able to handle tens of thousands of financial entries per fiscal quarter with the kind of support I get from that vendor (when I call, it's one of four people who all know me by my first name, know the internal politics, know the systems, and know my limits of abilities, etc.), there's still the hours of migrating the data from one system to the other. A full blown linux stack is useless for us because there's a dozen other windows-only applications that run our business that don't have Linux counterparts designed to scale to the magnitude that we need it to.

Even if you said, "okay, just switch your mail server then", I again ask the question - why? for a warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not giving my money to Microsoft - the Microsoft that's already got my money for the present Exchange server? So that the mail store can run on ZFS and be somewhat more fault tolerant? Would whatever the product I'd switch to be able to seamlessly import the hundreds of gigabytes of mail that already exists and would cost me my job if it wasn't able to be migrated? So I get better support than having every question I've ever had exactly one Google search away?

Exchange isn't the only option, but - stay with me now - I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch AWAY from it. Sure, it makes sense if you're starting from scratch. Heck, I'm working with another client to replace their present Squirrelmail abomination with a Zimbra stack, so I'm not opposed to it in a broad sense. But I'm still waiting to hear the list of specific (and neither "more secure" nor "free [in any sense of the word]" fit that criteria) functionality that would make a switch away from Exchange worth the migration.

As for 'instant search', as I said to another reply, it does require the freely downloadable Windows Desktop Search plugin. The semantics of what exactly is being searched is irrelevant to exactly all of my end users as long as the e-mail they're thinking of is found at the end of the day.

Re:Outlook

[FranTaylor]

-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large

Yes I do that every single day with Thunderbird on a crappy laptop and it works just fine. I have 9 years of hourly automated test run reports in a single folder. They are all indexed so I can search them all in a snap.

Re:Outlook

[syousef]

Neither has an equivalent to Outlook.

Outlook is terrible. Don't believe me? Try getting a list of your next appointments INCLUDING RECURRING for the next 2 weeks. The only view that does it within Outlook is the clunky calendar itself. The list views do not. The only way to get around this that I know of is to export the data to Excel. And don't get me started on stability (though how much of that is plugins isn't clear to me since I don't run Outlook at home).

Outlook has to be one of the most over-rated pieces of software on the planet.

Re:Outlook

[Darinbob]

Outlook gets used as a "all in one" app by many corporations. This does not tend to happen with Excel or Word. As long as you can export a Word or Excel compatible document from whatever alternative you have, you can use that in the corporate world. But email/calendar/contacts equivalents to Outlook don't interoperate very well, especially when someone in IT has decided to add some integration features, use custom Outlook forms, and so on.

Re:Outlook

[Darinbob]

This tends to require that the entire company make a conscious effort to allow alternatives to Outlook. Ie, you need IT buy in, and no one is more pro-Microsoft and anti-user-choice than IT. It requires buy in from everyone so that they don't go and create some automation script that requires others to use an Outlook form. It means that when you hire new IT people you need to make sure that they're ok working in a company that is not 100% Microsoft.

Sure, everything can start off wholesome. But over time the Microsoft virus can start creeping in. Then you'll find that you're on the losing end, and everyone is glaring at you for being the person blocking "progress" because they're wasting money supporting servers for open protocols when they already have Microsoft sanctified servers for most people.

Re:Outlook

[MikeBabcock]

Agreed. As an open source software advocate and user, I'm always wondering when someone with the skills required will write a proper replacement for Outlook's non-Email capabilities. That is to say, I don't value Outlook as an E-mail platform at all. Its the bundled crap they threw in after the failure of Schedule+ that's become nearly necessary in business circles.

PS Evolution is terrible in comparison.

Re:Outlook

[deeweef]

In the latest version of Exchange there really isn't that much need of it, as the Outlook web app is so good that you won't miss the fat one.

Re:Outlook

[MikeBabcock]

Please learn to space your text properly. Reading your comments is terribly annoying with all that extra whitespace.

Other than that, I agree with you :)

Re:Outlook

[ckaminski]

All my issues with Exchange died the minute Microsoft gave up on the whole X.500 addressing bullshit and built decent SMTP support into it. IMHO Exchange has been getting better and better as it ages.

Something I'm not sure I can say about SQL Server.
Fricking .Net Enterprise Manager... grumble grumble.

Re:Outlook

[Vancorps]

Given the topic being Exchange/Outlook, would you care to enlighten us as to what functionality is seldom used or designed for specific markets? Let's be clear, we're talking about current solutions of which only the Oracle collaboration suite I've seen can hold a candle to it, maybe.... maybe by a long shot Notes but they both have many of the same problems and in the case of the collaboration suite don't even attempt to remove Outlook from the equation.

Re:Outlook

[scaryjohn]

That you spend your entire day in an overgrown Email program speaks to your skill set more than anything else.

Switch "your skill set" to your boss's skill set, and I'll agree with everything you just said. The world's capacity for *nix coders and administrators, though arbitrarily large, is finite.

Re:Outlook

[migla]

I'm sure that, technically, Eddie the Eagle was a competitor too.

Re:Outlook

[Vancorps]

Catch up, we're in 2011 and instant as you type searches are common place with Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, 2010 is even quite a bit faster.

Re:Outlook

[w_dragon]

I have 2GB of mail saved on my home thunderbird and it is so slow to open that I've switched back to gmail's web interface. Apparently there was a bug where large mailboxes with lots of small messages caused the indexing to choke, but you know what? I don't care why it happened, I care that thunderbird performed horribly on a medium amount of mail. I care that GMail or Outlook can handle that amount without trying, and I'm not going back to thunderbird unless there is compelling reason to leave GMail's web-interface.

Re:Outlook

[w_dragon]

The whitespace seems to be a slashdot 'feature' at the moment, I see it on all comments with just a few exceptions right now.

Re:Outlook

[digitig]

That you spend your entire day in an overgrown Email program speaks to your skill set more than anything else.

Oh, emacs is far more than just an email program. It's an editor too, you know. Er, we were talking about emacs, weren't we?

Re:Outlook

[ckaminski]

Outlook does not search instantly - it requires a plugin on XP, and the built-in indexing services in Windows 7 to function.

And Google Desktop seems to search better, though it is uglier.

Outlook has presense/resource scheduling down, and it's integration with Lync is going to be a killer app for a lot of businesses.

those businesses that integrate with Outlook via plugins and apps (of the VBA style) - those are the people you'll never be able to migrate and the FOSS world just doesn't have competitors for.

Re:Outlook

[Belial6]

Not the web app that was just rolled out where I work. It sucks. But given that the admins couldn't properly support Domino/Notes, and would regularly disable features because they 'didn't understand it', I wouldn't be surprised if what I am now seeing isn't also a small subset of a much better application.

Re:Outlook

[deeweef]

I think it' s only on Exchange 2010. (Btw: It works in Firefox if anybody doubted that)

Re:Outlook

[realityimpaired]

True... but GMail with Google Calendar is close enough for *most* users. Doesn't have the nag popups that Outlook has, but other than that, most of the features that exist in Outlook (that 90% of users ever use) are implemented. And with an Android-based phone, it integrates quite well, as well as Exchange integrates with a crackberry.

That said, it's the featuers that those other 10% of users use, as well as the fact that Google owns the servers it's on, that keep the corporate overlords from switching to that platform. Some companies *have* switched to it already.

And that's just one example. There *are* other programs that do it. For an integrated solution I'd agree that Outlook is the best option for most of us, but it's not the only game on the block.

Re:Outlook

[MikeBabcock]

I wonder if its a side-effect of using Extrans or HTML modes. I always post in PLAIN fwiw.

Re:Outlook

[jonbryce]

"I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature."
Which is just as well, because Outlook doesn't have Usenet support.

Re:Outlook

[kabloom]

The point is that it's not LibreOffice's place to write an Outlook replacement. The job will be at least as difficult as reverse engineering the Microsoft Word formats, and LibreOffice isn't likely to have a good Outlook replacement for years to come. If you want to devote resources to the task, get involved in Evolution.

Re:Outlook

[realityimpaired]

Depending on what you're doing with the workstation, they aren't a replacement. For basic use, yeah, the two are reasonably interchangeable. LDAP and other services can even let you set up roaming profiles on multiple workstations, and yes, basic document processing functionality is there... it's enough to write a research paper, perhaps, but there's an aspect you aren't considering....

Well, two, actually. First, I occasionally run statistics equations on large spreadsheets... stuff that usually crashes OO.o. I haven't tried LibreOffice, but considering that those same spreadsheets and calculations have a tendency to crash even Office 2k3 and earlier, I would be rather surprised if LO could handle it properly. It's a rather specialized and rarified use, but there are applications for MS Office that neither LO nor OO are useable for.

The other thing you haven't considered, and it's the applications that businesses use. Very few businesses restrict themselves to basic spreadsheets and word processing. While it may be possible to get Application X to run under Linux, there's no guarantee that feature Y will work, or that the vendor will support it. Something like vendor support is hugely important for business, and being able to hold somebody outside of your company responsible if the shit ever hits the fan is a major part of a business decision.

Don't get me wrong. For the home user, Linux is certainly viable as an alternative. For Business, it may or may not be a good decision, depending on your needs.

Re:Outlook

[vux984]

I keep hearing from MS Office users that they'd ditch Office in a nanosecond if there was a competitor to Outlook, but since there isn't they don't bother moving to the OpenOffice/LibreOffice half-offering.

We found our staff were highly attached to Outlook, but really only had minimal composition requirements for Word/Excel. And most only consumed powerpoint.

We have a small group of people that need to work and exchange complex office documents, compose powerpoint etc, and they are getting Office 2010. This would be some people in marketing (powerpoint guys), accounting (excel power users), legal, executive, etc.

But the vast majority of the staff are getting OpenOffice 3.3, Microsoft Outlook, and the free Microsoft document viewers (Powerpoint Viewer mostly).

We did some trials for the last 6 months, and we found that in most cases, as you implied, the big item people were attached to was outlook, and the lack of any completely adequate alternatives. So they're getting the new version of outlook (most are on Outlook XP or 2003 now), and the staff are generally supportive of the new rollout.

And the cost of outlook VLA per seat is just under a quarter the cost of Office 2010 Standard VLA... so we're saving about 75%.

The only other note i will make is that we are setting OO to use the doc and xls formats by default for word and excel to make everyone's life simpler.

I'd prefer the open document formats, but the reality is that we need to exchange documents enough with customers / vendors, and other MS office users that the office formats as defaults make sense for most of our users.

Re:Outlook

[Belial6]

Yep, that is what we are on. I does work on Firefox, as well as Chrome, and funnily enough, it work just the same running in a tab in Lotus Notes.

Re:Outlook

[Registered Coward v2]

Outlook gets used as a "all in one" app by many corporations. This does not tend to happen with Excel or Word. As long as you can export a Word or Excel compatible document from whatever alternative you have, you can use that in the corporate world.

You also need to be able to import them as well - something OO/LO aren't good at as the article pointed out.

Re:Outlook

[commodore6502]

I work for a large organization, and I don't see the MS Outlook is all that great. From my viewpoint it's just an email program + calendar. Both Thunderbird and SeaMonkey have that, plus the Usenet handling so I can participate in newsgroups.

No idea what SharePoint is.

Re:Outlook

[hairyfeet]

Hear hear! Your posting is a perfect example of what I've been trying to get across for years here, in that the problem is never Windows and Office and that magically switching Windows for Linux and MS Office for OO.o will just get you fired because it is the 40 billion other programs that without which you have employees being paid to flick paper airplanes at each other and update their FB profile that bites you in the ass HARD.

For me with my customers the PITA that makes Linux a non option is QuickBooks. Here QuickBooks is God and anyone who has sat down with a small business owner and taken an overview of the situation will see why: With QB you can have the whole smash, from payroll and inventory to taxes and parts, all handled by a single "QuickBooks Girl" (and for some reason it is ALWAYS a "QuickBooks Girl". If I didn't know better I'd say they had a union rule or something) and everything "just works" and the QB Girl takes care of the paperwork and everything just runs smooth.

And I'm sorry Linux guys but I tried to learn and like GnuCash, i really did. but GnuCash is to QB what Gimp is to photoshop, there simply is NO comparison. And trying to get QB to run stable on Linux will make you pull your hair out and if QB is down you might as well send everyone home for all the work that'll get done.

So while there is nothing wrong with OO.o, in fact I hand it out to every single home user with new builds, it is never OO.o that is the problem. like others pointed out it is Outlook which has fifty plugins that make it a kick ass PIM, it is Exchange that ties everything together all nice and neat, it is those fifty bazillion mission critical apps that a company has come to depend on that simply have NO equivalent in Linux.

If Linux is gonna make inroads on the desktop it'll have to be in the home NOT in business where too much money and data is already tied up in solutions that get the job done. Sadly the only Linux I see being pushed to the home is Ubuntu, which is so bleeding edge the wallpaper should be a straight razor and which breaks more than it fixes with each release. But expecting you can convert businesses by simply replacing Windows and Office is not only naive and unrealistic, in most businesses it would be suicide. Without the apps and collaborative software to tie everything together work simply doesn't get done, and most of those apps are Windows only and a royal PITA to switch from. It would be nice if we could all just switch to any OS and still be able to work, but that just isn't reality for most ATM.

Re:Outlook

[onefriedrice]

Your argument is reminiscent of those who argue LibreOffice and Ubuntu Linux can not be used as replacements for MS products either.

Actually, it's completely different for the simple reason that applications are much more important than the operating system. Give me the exact same application on top of a different operating system, and I still have everything I need. Swap out an application with unique features for something less capable and there's a problem. Ubuntu is a viable replacement for Windows because they're both just operating systems. You might as well give me NetBSD or Solaris for all it matters. But a platform which doesn't have the applications I need is useless, no matter the operating system. If you're going to be honest with yourself (and assuming you're event aware), you have to admit that Thunderbird is not a complete replacement for Outlook, Gimp is not a direct replacement for Photoshop, and some people may argue that even LibreOffice doesn't have the features they need which Office provides. There may be workarounds to satisfy some of the needs of these people which may or may not actually be satisfactory, but for some applications there really are no real replacements. Admitting the truth and working to improve our reality is not a knock against open source.

Re:Outlook

[Americium]

It flat out beats Calc for advanced functionality.

And that's if you ignore that VBA is built into excel, which makes it something far more powerful than OpenOffice.

Re:Outlook

[Shadow99_1]

Ok this is funny... I was IT for several places I worked and loved suggesting alternatives to the IE+outlook+MS office bundle when I could. Management was the ones that wouldn't 'buy in'. They wanted things to work like they had always worked. MS apps do that, because it is what they have always used. They don't want to change. I couldn't even get them to support buy in for switching browsers...

Saying that IT people don't want to leave MS products and outlook in particular is frankly silly.

Re:Outlook

[falconwolf]

Outlook is more then just a e-mail reader. Corporate support for Outlook and nothing else is from running Exchange as their collaboration suite. Nothing works better with Exchange than Outlook and replacing all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook is not easy.

And there are other collaborative programs out there. I seriously doubt MS Exchange Server/Outlook is indispensable. It's like if it's not MS it's not usable. That's just as bad as those who say only Macs are good or those who say only Linux is good.

Falcon

Re:Outlook

[falconwolf]

To put it bluntly, as much as Outlook sucks for Email, it is in a class all by itself when it comes to being a PIM for someone in a large company.

And no other software does what Outlook does? You say there are plug-ins to allow Outlook do other things, what's thew difference between that and installing different programs? Aren't those plug-ins programs?

If it wasn't needed or people didn't want the features of Outlook, people would use something else in large companies

Nope, it's PHBs that decide what's used, not individual users. Look how Linux became a widely used server, IT/IS workers silently installed it in locations few if any others saw. Linux is now robust-able enough for stock exchanges, hedge funds, and stock trading.

Falcon

Re:Outlook

[Darinbob]

By "IT people" I am also including "IT managers" and even "CIO". People in the IT department. A lot of other people may want to use Outlook but they don't really care what's driving it behind the scenes.

But I see it from the ground floor too, especially when a company starts to grow and the one small group of 3 IT guys turns into a large department chock full of new hires that only know what their MS certification classes taught them. Or you have an insistent advocate for some particular technology (SharePoint) that is able to influence higher up managers.

Re:Outlook

[falconwolf]

you need IT buy in, and no one is more pro-Microsoft and anti-user-choice than IT.

Except that is exactly how Linux, LAMP, took over many servers, IT sneaked it into the server room.

It means that when you hire new IT people you need to make sure that they're ok working in a company that is not 100% Microsoft.

People with experience in either Linux or OSX are growing. There are even some with experience in both. I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro and under my desk I have two towers PC, one with Linux and the other dual-boots Linux and Windows. I haven't used either in too long though but I want to rebuild the Linux PC then I'll network them all.

you'll find that you're on the losing end, and everyone is glaring at you for being the person blocking "progress" because they're wasting money supporting servers for open protocols when they already have Microsoft sanctified servers for most people.

Or you'll be the hero for fighting against vendor lock-in, which requires massive upgrades and the money needed for that.

Falcon

Re:Outlook

[PitaBred]

Thunderbird + the Sunbird add-on works admirably well, and it connects with any CalDAV server. It's not a 100% drop-in replacement, but it does 95% of what Outlook does.

Re:Outlook

[lennier]

And no other software does what Outlook does?

Apparently not, and not for want of trying. I've been watching the OSS world for, what, about 14 years now? And nothing has come even close to touching Outlook/Exchange. We've had Evolution. We've had Chandler. We've had iCalendar, CalDAV, SyncML. Nothing's filled the whole solution space.

To this day I do not comprehend how come email got world standardised via SMTP in 1982 (okay, with glaring security holes like the Sender: field, but still, interoperable), yet calendaring and contacts is still impossible to interoperate except through one defacto-standard system. Seriously, you have some kind of database, some kind of syncing system, a schema of object types... it's not rocket science, right? It could have been sorted around 1983 at the latest?

And yet... we just migrated from Groupwise to Outlook/Exchange at work, and I can tell you, it's been a huge step up.

Re:Outlook

[lennier]

And there are other collaborative programs out there. I seriously doubt MS Exchange Server/Outlook is indispensable.

If you seriously doubt that, then you simply haven't worked in business.

I'm truly sorry, but yes, this is exactly the situation. It's nothing to do with being Microsoft; I'm as surprised as you are that MS managed to create a good product in Exchange. But they did, and now they have total enterprise collaboration dominance, and ignoring it won't help.

The sheer length of that list of would-be contenders is part of the problem. There's a million half-assed, incomplete, and mutually incompatible attempts at creating an Outlook/Exchange replacement. The fact that they don't interoperate is key to why they don't work.

What we need is not a product, but a protocol - in the same way that what unseated the 1980s Online Services oligopoly of Compuserve, GEnie, BIX et al wasn't a competitor, but HTTP and SMTP. But sadly, what we have for protocols in the collaboration space we can count on one hand: iCalendar, CalDAV, SyncML. They don't entirely interoperate, and they certainly don't specify all of the solution space.

I'm baffled as to why this is so. But probably, Google not being at all interested in the desktop and preferring to rent web applications, and Apple having their own tidy lock-in game on the iPhone/iPad would explain why there's been no frontal challenge from them. And IBM has been committed to Lotus Notes, which was a good idea in theory but... and Novell had Groupwise which, just, ouch, and now they're toast. And Sun, I mean Oracle, never even tried.

But the open source guys, I was sure they were going to crack it, but nope. Beats me why not.

Re:Outlook

[lennier]

no one is more pro-Microsoft and anti-user-choice than IT. It requires buy in from everyone so that they don't go and create some automation script that requires others to use an Outlook form.

It's not actually the case that IT departments are by definition pro-Microsoft, but they are very often pro-single-source provider. If you want to know why, your next sentence just answered your own strawman.

The entire purpose of an IT department is to automate rollout and delivery of services, to create a unified corporate 'look and feel', and generally to make life simple and happy and productive for all the actual value-generating staff of the organisation. Anything that gets in the way of that reduces value for the company, and since IT is a cost centre to start with... well, we don't get paid just to play with shiny toys. We play with shiny toys so that other people can work with the shiny toys. Sometimes that means taking some of the shiny off in order to save users from themselves.

And yes, we deploy a lot of automation scripts. Guess what? If your proposed alternative 'solution' to a widely deployed, fully vendor-supported, must-have-it-or-the-enterprise-breaks-instantly product is so different that it doesn't even respond to the same scripts... which means all our infrastructure has to be duplicated, triplicated, tested, multi-tested, with tens to hundreds of man-hours per script... and that's even assuming that it a) provides all the required organisational features and interoperate exactly...

So the organisation instantly suffers breakage of automation, increased user training, more IT hours burned, more support calls filed with vendors, and what, exactly, does the organisation gain by doing this? It would have to be some really big, must-have innovative feature which the current core system doesn't have, and which isn't available as an extension.

Look, on my desk right now I have Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's my job to keep both of them patched and up to date with the latest security patches. How hard to you reckon that ought to be?

Well, with IE8, I just go to the WSUS server, triage the latest Microsoft patches as they come in on Black Tuesday, stage them through our testing groups, and it's done. If there are any security announcements that don't have patches, we can use Group Policy to instantly block access to websites, turn off features, set security levels, etc. One click in Active Directory and the whole site is secure.

Firefox? Well now, that's an entirely different story. One, it doesn't support Group Policy configuration, so we have to write a script to read the prefs.js, edit it to set the variables we want, and yet preserve the users' existing settings. And make sure we do this at a time when the user doesn't have the file locked open, but the file is still accessible. And make sure the user profile gets copied correctly in the right order, because it's all just files, but it's cached locally or remotely depending on.... and then, actual updates? Well, again, there's no enterprise deployment mechanism for patch updates, so I have to write a custom script to somehow prevent the user from starting Firefox while we run the install, decode the silly salt directory (a 'security feature' intended to block admins from doing exactly what we need to do), preserve the user's preferences and bookmarks and plugins, then run the install... then figure out which plugins the user has installed and run the installers for those, without letting the installers do what they want to do natively which is hit the Net and do their own installing...

Firefox seems to always think it's running on a home user's machine, and thinks it owns the place. Internet Explorer is aware that it's likely running on a corporate desktop, and plays nice. There's a world of difference between the 'feel' of the two.

And I *like* Firefox, and I miss not having it as my standard browser, and I run Ubuntu at home, but work demands i

Re:Outlook

[westyvw]

Quickbooks is 1 of the two reasons why I LEFT Microsoft products behind. I dont agree at all with your assesment. QB is a crutch, a timewaster and a pain in the ass if you have to manage multiple locations and offices. Add in the questionable legal tactics and security flaws of Quicken (at the time for me anyway) and the deal was over. I am not trusting some closed ever changing application with my financial data.
The effort of tracking licenses and users was unbearable. I moved all accounting to a server based solution, rolled out the ability to do entry and views in and out of the office, and got it onto a Linux server. End of year I paid an accountant/tax office to actually do thier job to pour over the books and make sure we were in balance and that was that.
As for Outlook, I am not impressed (maybe I should try the plugin's as I never have) but the (out of the box) lack of instant search for people, lack of drag and drop of resources/accounts into calendars, and general mess the UI is for me, I would have to believe there is a better way.

The IT manager of a small (about 700) users system has gone all FOSS and does just fine once told me "People come and see, admire the low operating cost, satisfied workers and high uptime of the system, then go home saying it will never work".
Quite frankly, I have personally been fairly happy with the latest release of Kontact, but I have to admit I have never seen it in a large operation.

Re:Outlook

[lennier]

And why would an office suite have an email reader?

Why wouldn't it? Does your office get by without email?

Re:Outlook

[lennier]

Outlook is terrible.

And yet, the alternatives are all so, so much worse.

I see your Outlook and raise you.... Novell Groupwise.

It couldn't give you a list of pending appointments either, except via the Calendar view. And if you clicked on the default weekly Calendar view, you had no way of moving backwards or forwards in time, because they hadn't thought to put a button there. You had to close the whole Calendar view and reopen in the Monthly view. That window was created around 1996, but they never updated it. User-configurable? Good lord, no. Why give the users anything? They'll just ask for more.

And creating a recurring appointment was a whole new adventure. There was that cute little pseudo-English text box where you could say 'every second Thursday' and hope it understood you... or you could click on every. single. day...

Good times, good times.

I swear, there's some dark cosmic law of the universe that says every groupware package must suck to preserve the Balance.

Re:Outlook

[Darinbob]

Very often it seems like IT works against some users. They like uniformity. This means some of them get a pained look in their eyes knowing that everyone in my group has sudo access and doesn't use Windows (some mac users were even sent reminders that they forgot to sign up for their Windows 7 upgrade and time was running out :-). Wanting to have GroupPolicy or automatically update a user's machine looks to me to be about having control, not about giving the user freedom. Sometimes it's useful to have control, but it definitely can get in the way of people getting work done.

The purpose of IT is to support the rest of the company. Automation has nothing to do with that except as a side effect of making it easier for IT to help support everyone else. The problems come around very often when this gets shuffled around, and the "support the users" drops down in priority. That support sometimes means breaking IT's own rules, such as allowing me to reconfigure routing on my machine or install drivers or not waiting weeks for someone to sign off on a set of tools.

There are some good IT professionals out there, but there are many many corporate drones as well.

Re:Outlook

[Damnshock]

I happen to be an "it guy" and I can assure you I am far away from being "pro-Microsoft" or any closed protocols for that matter. Just to give you a simple example: Skype is giving me lots of headaches in the office network.

Give me IMAP, give me LDAP, give me jabber...(you get the idea, right?) and you can use whatever you want as long as it respects standards.

Re:Outlook

[jp10558]

I suppose it depends, but here at Cornell, they recently switched from some ancient Oracle Calendar plus Thunderbird e-mail with a solaris mail backend to Exchange. Let's just say that it's been as close to an unmitigated disaster as I can imagine.

I don't know if it's Exchange, the implementation or what, but Calendaring works worse, most people still can't figure out that you can't open someone's calendar but have to use scheduling assistant. Outlook is far worse from a speed, setup, maintenance, and usability perspective that Thunderbird was.

Most people I know curse Outlook for being slow, randomly telling us the admin says we have to re-start it, hanging trying to open calendars, having a worse UI for searching the LDAP/GAL whatever, needing special tools to migrate to a new computer vs copying one folder, needing users to type in the password twice or more to re-configure it on a new computer, and oh - being painfully slow on any PC I've tried, including core i5's with lots of RAM...

I suppose it probably was a bad fit as we only wanted e-mail and a shared calendar hosted internally. It sounds like if you have sharepoint or plugins or something - Outlook is better in some way. Of course it doesn't address the lack of Linux support or the changing and confusing Mac support.

Of course, it could be that we weren't always an Outlook / Exchange shop so we "just don't get it", but I've had responses from meh to "please make it go away so I can go back to something that at least pretends to work". I haven't heard anything positive. (No, I take that back. One user thought Outlook looked prettier than Thunderbird).

Re:Outlook

[jp10558]

+1 from me. It sounds like Outlook is a lot like Firefox - if you don't use plugins, there are probably better programs out there for it. At least for primarily e-mail use Thunderbird seems much better in my use. If only OWA wasn't so clunky for calendaring...

Re:Outlook

[Yaruar]

If I understand you correctly, I can do exactly that in a list view via View, Current VIew, Active Appointments and then adding an end date filter. That's with outlook 2007 though, earlier versions are a bit clunkier.. You can even use sql to generate the query if you are bored enough.

As for stability, Outlook is exceptionally stable, especially compared to Evolution or Entourage, YMMV of course, plug ins will always degrade stability, but that's the nature of any software.

Back to the topic though, the general attitude of the FOSS community towards products like Outlook/Exchange is exactly why they aren't taken seriously by business. You need to pick your targets and fight those ones. Exchange isn't one of them, it is lightyears ahead of any competition and just getting better whilst the alternatives are floundering. Cloud based solutions are an alternative, but Exchange is at least 2 or 3 generations ahead of any of the competitors and continually innovating. I've yet to meet an email admin who would choose to impliment an large corporate solution on FOSS groupware solution or even a plain old mailbox server.

It's quite clear that a number of people here (mostly people who aren't email admins in the corporate environment) don't actually understand the business requirements for a groupware solution. Certainly my current business would struggle to operate if we went to a different solution with less features.

Re:Outlook

[marcosdumay]

"Except that is exactly how Linux, LAMP, took over many servers, IT sneaked it into the server room. "

LAMP is a completely different situation. Any small team of IT people can put a LAMP stack to work and look like it saves the day. To replace MS desktop tools one'd need cooperation from the entire IT department, as any small team of IT people can put a solution that depends on those tools to work and look like it saves the day.

"Or you'll be the hero for fighting against vendor lock-in, which requires massive upgrades and the money needed for that."

No way. You'll be that not cooperative employee fighting against a solution that will save the day. Nevermind that the solution will cost so much at the long term that the original problem was cheaper, that will only be clear at the long term, and nobody will like to hear an "I told you so".

Re:Outlook

[falconwolf]

You'll be that not cooperative employee fighting against a solution that will save the day. Nevermind that the solution will cost so much at the long term that the original problem was cheaper,

Put it this way, I'd rather work somewhere that is open to new possibilities and new way that are cheaper than one that puts up with expensive proprietary lock-in software. Beware of the nibble and adaptive competition who has lower operating costs.

I'd rather be that competition than a drone for someone who will not adapt.

Falcon

Summary so you don't need to RTFA

[commodore6502]

They are the same.
- except LibreOffice doesn't come with Java for the database
- and LO has some new stuff like SVG and MSworks/WordPerfect file support

I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?

Re:Summary so you don't need to RTFA

[shutdown -p now]

I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?

Go-OO does not exist as a standalone project anymore. The only reason why it was there in the first place is the difficulty to get the patches accepted into mainstream by Sun/Oracle. This problem doesn't exist with LibreOffice, and, indeed, one of the first things they did after forking was to merge Go-OO in.

Re:Summary so you don't need to RTFA

[WhiteSpade]

I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?

From what I understand, one of the first things LibreOffice did after forking was import the GO-oo patch-set. I believe GO-oo and BrOffice intend to merge into LibreOffice and combine their efforts. I am not affiliated with any of the projects though, so some of my information could be incorrect or out of date.

---Alex

Re:Summary so you don't need to RTFA

[GameboyRMH]

LibreOffice has everything that Go-OO has.

OpenOffice is also fully free

[kabloom]

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both fully free. The difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice is who's in charge, and whose contributions are getting accepted.

Not looking back

[icebike]

At work we (and some of our customers) switched to OOO about 3 years ago, and for the types of documents (including some rather large manuals) it works just fine, and imported all of our old documents, from multiple different versions of MSOffice and Word.

When the devs jumped ship, we jumped with them to LibreOffice, retaining just a few seats of OOO in our customers shop, because they already paid for support contracts. But reports are that they have not been happy with what little help they got. The phone techs knew less than our people.

There are some missing functions that MS-Office users wish were available, and maddeningly well hidden features as well as stuff that just does not work. But these were not mainstream functionality that we needed in our shop.

LibreOffice is currently every bit as good as OOO, and in some ways better. Going forward, all the wet-ware is in their corner, and Oracle will probably take a year bringing replacements up to speed before any serious bugs can be addressed, let alone new features. (Although nothing will stop them from feeding off of the efforts of LibreOffice).

  LibreOffice probably needs to think about a revenue stream for the future. I'm fine with that. Let those who absolutely have to have support contracts in place (for what ever reason) foot the bill.

Re:Not looking back

[NortySpock]

LibreOffice probably needs to think about a revenue stream for the future.

They have a funding drive going on right now.

They have a lot of people on their side, but the real issue will be paying down the technical debt in the codebase. It really needs an overhaul.

Re:Not looking back

[Dr_Barnowl]

They've added some of the debt to their Easy Hacks page ; I had a crack at some of the more mundane tasks like removing defunct macros with shell scripts.

Re:Not looking back

[lordDallan]

How has the support for vbscript macros been for you? Do you get document that use a lot of vbscript in them? I know from experience that regular files with vbscript built into them keeps a lot of companies tied into MS Office. Usually it's RFPs from vendors that have vbscript doing calculations. These must be used or you don't get the work.

Re:Not looking back

[coolmadsi]

They've added some of the debt to their Easy Hacks page ; I had a crack at some of the more mundane tasks like removing defunct macros with shell scripts.

Thanks for the link! I have been meaning to get involved into Open Source in my spare time, this looks like a good way to make an initial start without risking getting in over my head. One of the first one seems to be related to removing unnececary comments, which is probably what I would start doing anyway if I were to get involved in something (I think code is easier to develop if it is documented well, mainly through comments)

Ho Hum article.

[BrokenHalo]

I haven't yet used LibreOffice, but I have been using OOo and NeoOffice (the Mac-native version of OOo) for years, and on the whole, I'm pretty happy with both. I'm a bit curious as to why TFA's author doesn't bother to mention NeoOffice. One glaring error I did spot is on the 3rd page of TFA where it is mentioned that Libre now supports SVG. All versions of the code have in fact done so for some time.

No doubt we shall shortly see posts from the Microsoft shills bagging OOo and variants, but the simple truth is that for 99.9% of purposes, the FOSS offerings are perfectly adequate.

Re:Ho Hum article.

[Temposs]

Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time. For instance:
http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html?download=mirrorbrain&files/stable/3.3.0/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_en-US.dmg

So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.

Re:Ho Hum article.

[SargentDU]

On my work Mac, I have Libreoffice and Neooffice. However, I needed neooffice on my Mac to open old Word Perfect files (WP) because my agency switched to Word several years ago and the older versions of Word did open WP however, recent versions do not and at the time, OpenOffice did not while NeoOffice did. Libreoffice has that functionality though, so now NeoOffice is redundant. Ps. Printing is fine with my Libreoffice.

Re:Ho Hum article.

[cbhacking]

Does OO.o (or LO) have support for the Track Changes feature yet? I not only use that multiple times per week at my sfotware development job (for reviewing specifications and test plans), I couldn't even have made it through one of my college English classes without it as the professor used this feature to send feedback to students. They didn't require that you have a copy of MS Office - you could use the computer labs, which included it - but they expected that you could access a reasonably complete set of Word's features.

Then there was the way that OO.o liked to mess up my footnotes; the few times I tried to use it for a paper I would always have to open the file on MS Office to fix formatting issues before submitting.

Re:Ho Hum article.

[udoschuermann]

Track changes, as in who made what alterations to the document (additions, removals, etc.) shown visually? Writer has had that feature for a few years at least.

As to footnotes, I've never had an issue with those in OOo, but MS Word destroyed entire documents (as in start from scratch because it no longer loads) when editing foot notes, and repeatedly replaced inserted images with big red X's, and other "fun" things to drive me to the brink. OOo has not been flawless, but it's treated me a lot better over the years than MS Word, and has never lost me data which is a lot more than can be said for MS Word. And yes, I have documents that are several hundred, and some even close to a thousand pages long. Well, YMMV.

As to the article, well, it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Bleah.

Re:Ho Hum article.

[Corporate Troll]

MS Word destroyed entire documents (as in start from scratch because it no longer loads)

Yes, I've had that happen to me too. You want to know how to repair it? Open it in OpenOffice, save it, and then open it back in Microsoft Word. Tadaaaa!

Re:Ho Hum article.

[BrokenHalo]

Doesn't Libre/OpenOffice on Mac still use X11? Not that I have a particular gripe against that, but it doesn't qualify as a native Mac application. Just about anything that can be compiled with gcc can run on a Mac if you're content to use X11.

Useless article to the last

[wangerx]

Overall, I think this article is far too premature. The last paragraph says it all "The great thing about both suites, however, is that your decision need not be set in stone." In other words, there was nothing really to compare nor contrast. With the lead of "side by side" comparison, one would at least expect some form of tabular results. I got the feeling the author wanted to make the case for OO by mentioning the Win7 install issues and "hopefully this is a bug that will be resolved soon", and that paid support would be a requirement for larger installations which LO does not have (officially). But after running the cost figures for 100 users, dropping $9,000 for OO in the cited example would set a fair amount of stone.

Re:Useless article to the last

[icebike]

Most of those support contract requirements are done from a CYA point of view.

The few I've seen, the end users didn't know there was a support contract, and in at least one case there was no record of it ever being exercised. Even their IT staff didn't know who to call, but just got on the web and found all the answers.

Those contract are almost never helpful.

Isn't LibreOffice, for now, Go-oo?

[blind biker]

As far as I know, Libre Office is based mostly (entirely?) on Novell's Go-oo. So this review compares OpenOffice with the much extended and improved Go-oo, which has better multilanguage support, a larger clip-art collection and better MS Office filters. Yes, this kind of article should have been written a long time ago, way before Libre Office appeared, because Go-oo deserved more exposure.

Better late than never.

Re:Isn't LibreOffice, for now, Go-oo?

[chihowa]

From their site:

Go-oo joins forces with LibreOffice
Go-oo shares much of its goals and philosophy with The Document Foundation's LibreOffice project, we're therefore supporting LibreOffice since it's inception, and are in the process of merging most of our patches over, as well as migrating to Document Foundation infrastructure. Going forward, the Go-oo project will be discontinued in favor of LibreOffice.

Good and bad

[dskoll]

I recently switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice on Debian. LibreOffice is mostly better, and the SVG import is a killer feature for me.

However, the one really bad thing about LibreOffice is that "Help" is essentially non-functional. It opens up a LibreOffice help web site that is incomplete and difficult to search. OO's built-in "Help" feature was much better. I don't know why LibreOffice took it out (licensing restrictions, perhaps?)

Re:Good and bad

[Gripeus]

As has been mentioned, install the help pack for the language of your choice. For US English (in Debian) that would be libreoffice-help-en-us At the moment I count 31 different help packs in Debian, which explains why they're not installed by default.

You're probably missing a few other optional packages as well. Try running the following to see what's not installed yet.

aptitude search '!~i!~v~nlibreoffice'

Oracle-induced format problems

[vlueboy]

I have a few different versions of OO 3 and recent proof that more than paranoia keeps me from updating all to Oracle's.
Why? My much-changed resume is a native Oracle OOo 3.2 file created in Ubuntu is having a problem I never saw while it was Sun's property. I just spent the last quarter hour seeking help for cross-platform corruption but found no relevant bug reports or solutions. It's the third time that the native format and the exported DOC file can't be opened in Windows' OOo and MS's Viewer --PDFs are safe for now. I can still edit them in Linux.

I keep several versions, some "e-mail obscured" to prevent job-board scammers from easily spamming me. When the job agents call and ID themselves (which spammers don't, and few scammers dare to) I e-mail them the "full" one. That's a pretty bad time to realize the file is corrupted.

I'll hit the LibreOffice repos and hope people there have fixed the problem. Oracle won't see me downloading their version starting with the next Ubuntu upgrade cycle.

Linux.com review

[drb226]

See also an (overly?) praising review noting some changes that LibreOffice has made.

If it needs Java

[countertrolling]

Then it ain't "libre"

Re:If it needs Java

[micheas]

Java is not needed. Java is used for some of the extensions, such as the save to a website running mediawiki page extension, and the mail merge extension.

The last I check the bug tracker libre office is planning on replacing the database connector with one that does not require java, so mail merge will not require java.

Why don't they....

[ndtechnologies]

just go ahead and rename it "OracleOffice" and just get it over with. I put LibreOffice on my work laptop months ago, and haven't looked back. Suck it Oracle.

unfortunately, LibreOffi isn't ready for primetime

[datapharmer]

Unfortunately Libre Office still needs some work. While it is now technically possible to save in .docx, saving to .doc causes the application to crash quite often. We have had a number of users that set .doc as their default (for compatibility with their clients outside our office) and they have been reporting that the entire application just quits on save quite frequently. It is able to recover the document the vast majority of the time, but it is definitely an annoyance. We are currently trying to determine if there is a workaround or if we have to go back to open office 3.2. (If anyone has a solution please let me know - I am all ears, and no, saving in open office native formats is not a solution).

Re:they both are no better than my feces

[Stormtrooper42]

It may not be convenient, but it is certainly possible:
Just click on the checkbox that says "regular expressions", you can then search for newlines using the dollar character, and replace whatever you want by a newline with '\n' .

What fees!

[FlyingGuy]

I just visited the OpenOffice.org website and no place other then in commercial / consultant support do I see anything asking me for money.

This summary in this post mentioning fees is utter bullshit.

This whole fucking thing is nothing more then people screaming "Oracle is EVIL and we gotta fork it NOW. The name is stupid and the reasoning to fork it was phenomenally stupid. They forked the code soon after Oracle purchased Sun and tried to play it off as "We are gonna put in all sorts of cool features!" that they could have put in well before there was even a rumor that Oracle was purchasing Sun, how come they didn't fork it then?

And OH By the fucking way people. I paid money to Sun for Star Office. Uh-huh, the software that OO was based on. This is not like OO was something that magically appeared on Source Forge one day. This was a commercial offering from sun that never really got traction so they started giving it way.

This whole thing smells of the entire MySQL fiasco. Monty sold it to sun for a fucking BILLION dollars then had a hissy fit when Sun was acquired by Oracle and he thought his precious toy database database would be corrupted.

pretty much ALL the core devs for OO were Sun employees and then they were Oracle employees. Oracle has kept their commitment and have pushed out updates/bug fixes/enhancements to OO.

I love open source software as much or more then the next guy, but this is just a bunch of people acting like baby's.

Re:What fees!

[udoschuermann]

the reasoning to fork it was phenomenally stupid

No, forking LO from OO.o was primarily a matter of getting development to move forward again at a better than glacial pace: The OO.o license requires submitted code to become Sun's (and now Oracle's) property. This kept many from donating their code, depositing it at Go-OO, instead. These changes are now moving into LO, which is starting to show faster improvement than OO.o.

If you think that is stupid, then ... well, ... you're entitled to your opinion. :)

Re:What fees!

[FlyingGuy]

Well I disagree, but reasonable people can.

As far as submitted code becoming the property of Oracle (nee Sun ) that is something I have not read in their license yet. I kind of doubt they could actually do that since it had been open source ( I think it was GPL ) and at any rate if you made a contribution you could easily mark your code as (c) yourself and licensed under GPL to Oracle, which would force them to either use it or lose it and if the contribution was that important I think they would use , but I digress.

Sun first published Star Office to make money, when they couldn't they gave it away. If it was forkable then it had to have been under some flavor of GPL Sun simply had to put the source out there with some sort of license other then proprietary

But I really think this is on par with the whole MySql drama. Perhaps they will shove "features" into it faster, but I am also betting the bug count will go up as well. Even now other users have posted that the damn thing is unstable, especially on shut down. If they forked the build code then it should be as solid as the Oracle version, but its not and that means they have broken it already. Way to go fella's!

Re:I want to use commas in spreadsheet functions!

[UnknownSoldier]

Yeah, coming from Exel and C/C++ where ',' is a function argument seperator, using semi-colon ';' is plain frustrating.

With any luck hopefully there would be: const char ARG_SEPERATOR = ';'; that could be changed...

Most OpenOffice devs are Oracle employees

[judeancodersfront]

Sun had a hard time attracting outside developers.

Re:they both are no better than my feces

[micheas]

neither of them can do vanila search and replace for new line character for last 10 years. i have 1 ticket per year. i can dig for ticket numbers.

With the ticket number that is a bug worth publicizing.

I could have sworn that was there, maybe it is in abiword.

with Windows as only a secondary platform

[hduff]

FTA "It seems most of the new development for LibreOffice is being done on Linux, with Windows as only a secondary platform."

And how's that feel?

LaTeX

[SwedishPenguin]

I've never really seen much of a need for an "office suite". LaTeX is much better at producing documents, spreadsheets may be of use for some minor calculations occasionally but for the things many companies use it for, a database would be better suited for the job. For presentations I recently discovered the powerdot package for LaTeX, it really works great and it's very easy to produce presentations that actually look good unlike the ones I've tried making in OO Impress...

Re:LaTeX

[spasm]

I love latex, write all of my single-authored academic work in it. And therein lies the rub - about 90% of my output is papers, presentations, and grants produced collaboratively with other people. None of whom know latex, none of whom are the slightest bit interested in learning it, and most of whom are more senior than me. Perhaps one day when I'm a senior researcher I can force my junior collaborators to learn and use latex, but until then, OO at least lets me collaborate with the rest of the word/ppt/xls using people in my not-very-computer orientated field. Getting (some) of them to at least consider using OO rather than continuing to pay for site licenses for microsoft is about as good as it's going to get..

Re:LaTeX

[CyranoDeBergerac]

Much as I love LaTeX, *no-one* outside academia uses it, and even there only the geekiest academics can be bothered to learn it.

Re:LaTeX

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

I was with you up to your complete ignorance of spreadsheets. A spreadsheet is like a database, data manipulator, scripting language, and reporting tool all rolled into one. To suggest people replace their spreadsheets with a database is to completely miss the point. We use spreadsheets to avoid having to have a database. Spreadsheets continue to be THE number one productivity enhancement tool in use in organizations today. Ask and project manager or systems engineer.

Re:LaTeX

[rabiddeity]

Actually I've found LaTeX better for collaborative documents than Word. I can use a version control system to do merges very easily if two people are working separately on changes to a tex document. Subversion and Git don't play nicely with (binary) .doc files, and the document merge "feature" of Word always leaves me with hanging invisible style issues. It's inconsistent, it's opaque, and it looks ugly. WYSIWYG, but what you see isn't what's all there.

Tell your colleagues to give you a flat text file for their chapter or portion of the document. Use a substitution tool to change the quotation marks to TeX's admittedly awkward backtick and apostrophe notation, then \input the file into your main document. If they need to edit your text, the tex syntax is human-readable enough that they can ignore what they don't understand. Then demo for them how easy it is to switch between ACM and IEEE formats (or any format of your choice) by changing a single line at the top. LaTeX's learning curve is long, but it's not particularly steep; you can learn to do things like bold and italics and chapter headings as you need to. Citations are a little bit more advanced but most people quickly warm to the idea of never having to look up bibliography styles Ever Again.

Coder/geeks tend to appreciate the simplicity of getting output based ONLY on what's in the input file, but you can convince anyone who can appreciate the professional classiness of a consistent document style. I can't count the number of times I've tried to copy and paste from one Word doc to another (while retaining bold and italics) and royally screwed up the formatting somehow without being able to see and fix the problem. Of course if your coworkers regularly use Comic Sans then it's probably a lost cause.

Re:LaTeX

[Anonymous Coward]

LaTeX is (almost) fundamentally incapable of producing an accessible PDF, for one thing. Text-based markup (and therefore proper DVCS compability) is the biggest thing LaTeX has going for it, but as much as I like it, it's aging fast. Something like Docbook + Conglomerate would be a MUCH better alternative, had Conglomerate been developed more.

Re:LaTeX

[spasm]

Oh, I agree with you that collaborating with someone via svn when you're using any non-binary format is a breeze compared to dealing with the multiple version and track changes hell of word. Unfortunately my seniors/superiors don't actually think latex output looks better than word - they think it looks unfamiliar, therefore worse/suspect. Worse - most journals we publish in (public health / epidemiology field) simply want .doc format, double-spaced text with 1" margins and no special formatting - many don't accept .tex. So no-one cares that the output document looks like hell, because that's what the journal asked for, and besides, the journal itself will do all the typesetting once the paper is accepted. For grants, we're mostly submitting to the US National Institutes of Health, which have limited (and incredibly ugly) style requirements: must be .doc, 0.5" margins, four allowable fonts, one allowable font size. There's actually a latex .cls file out there somewhere which produces this hideous stuff, for those lucky enough to at least be able to do the writing process in latex, but from an output point of view it's irrelevant.

The ability to switch citation styles instantly in Latex is useful, but a) these guys all have large endnote libraries they've assembled over years, and the idea of switching to another bib. manager gives them palpitations, and b) endnote/word do a passable job of reformatting to different journal requirements, at least if all you want is clean enough formatting to submit a double-spaced draft to a journal editor. On top of that, most of these guys have assistants who they get to do final citation cleanup before the article or grant gets submitted anyway, so the hackwork of doing it manually isn't their problem. For that matter, they have junior colleagues and assistants who can be tasked with managing the multiple versions / track changes nastiness as well - I spent a lot of time a few months ago doing exactly this for a book chapter I was co-authoring with a bunch of Very Senior People. I got to be a co-author on a book chapter with Famous Scholars; they didn't have to deal with the downside of word, but they screamed when I suggested using something other than word - they all wanted to be able to mangle each others text and see who had done what to who in pretty colours with track changes, not learn how to read subversion logs..

Finally, and probably most importantly, they're not really computer oriented people. Learning to use word/endnote effectively was something of a struggle for most of them, and asking them to set that body of skill aside for something new requires really substantial incentives. At the moment, the primary advantages of latex aren't really that much of an advantage to someone who has underlings to deal with word's disadvantages, and the primary "disadvantages" (not being able to instantly see in pretty colours who edited what; having to switch the entire toolchain) are seen as huge.

Still, I try from time to time with projects where there seems to be a particular advantage to latex (most book chapters) or where I'm dealing with younger colleagues who are both willing and able to experiment with new toolchains to try and address things they see as problems (such as version hell). And as I said, one day I'll probably be a Senior Scholar and can inflict my preferences on more junior collaborators, and it'll be easier to use latex at that point..

Re:LaTeX

[rabiddeity]

Well said. I don't envy your position. Progress can be slow in academia.

My own thesis advisor couldn't grok why I was using such an obscure tool, but when he requested I change citation formats with a week left and I delivered the change in half an hour I'd like to think he was impressed. Then I showed him how easy it was to create grant proposals that didn't look horrid. I probably didn't convert him from Word, but maybe he'll come around in a decade or so.

If it's any consolation, one of the senior faculty review members for my thesis was a LaTeX fan. He has enough clout that he can coerce his students into using it, and they all appreciate it once they get over that initial hump.

Re:Poor .docx support?

[udoschuermann]

If its true that OpenOffice and LibreOffice have poor support for Office 2007 and 2010 formats, that is going to be a MAJOR stumbling block against many people migrating. No company in their right mind is going to migrate if they are going to loose document-compatability with their clients.

For relatively simple documents conversion support is quite decent, for complex ones, it's can be a real crap shoot from what I've seen and heard. But this is much more a data conversion than a capabilities issue. In fact, I'd be surprised if there is any document created in MS Word that cannot be created in LO or OO.o, and vice versa.

With something as complex as a document, there will always be conversion issues, but until more people start using software that does not force them into a continual upgrade cycle, the pain for the rest of us will not lessen by much.

As for me, I have created all my documents in OO.o (and now in LO) for many years. I export them to .doc when necessary; the .doc/.docx files I receive, I import into OO.o / LO, and export them again as .doc if I modify them and double check them with MS Office: They've always been fine, and I have yet to hear any screaming around the office. I've seen worse conversion jobs (even crashes) between different versions of MS Office.

Don't kid yourself about OSX

[falconwolf]

but it has it's own share of UI disasters.

Like what?

Some like having the Trash and Eject be the same UI target were a dumb idea from day one. Some, like having all of the menus at the top of the screen made sense when we were on low resolution single screen systems, but are detriments in multi-monitor high resolutions systems, and some of them are brand new bonehead decisions like choose to use a green plus for a button that will shrink the screen.

Those are all person preferences. Some like you have problems with them but others may like them.

And the so called "maximize" green button is not a maximize button at all, it resizes the current window to its optimal width and height. Personally I'd rather it maximize windows but I don't have a problem grabbing a corner and dragging it to make it bigger, or smaller. And that was a problem I had with MS Windows, if a window were maximized it couldn't be made smaller simply by grabbing a corner. It had to be reduced in size by clicking the reduce button first. Only then could a corner be grabbed to make it the size the user wants.

Falcon

Oh, btw when I said that about MS Windows I meant those versions I've used however I have not used any version in more than 3 years. The last I used was XP.

Re:Don't kid yourself about OSX

[Belial6]

Those are all person preferences. Some like you have problems with them but others may like them.

So, you hold the stance that there is no such thing as bad UI. It is all just a preference. I disagree. Some things are just preference. Like whether your wallpaper is a picture of a planet, a picture of a field, or a wash of brown. Somethings are not. Like using white text on a white background, having a green plus shrink a screen, or using the same UI target for the trashcan and eject.

And the so called "maximize" green button is not a maximize button at all, it resizes the current window to its optimal width and height [forevergeek.com].

Your link points to a strawman. The problem isn't that it doesn't maximize, the lack of which I do find to be a glaring omission as well. The problem is that it DOES NOT set the screen to 'optimum' size. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it shrinks the window. Sometimes it enlarges it. Sometimes it 'maximizes' it, and sometimes it puts the application into a completely different UI mode. Again. The green plus button DOES NOT put the window into 'optimum' size for the document. It that is it's intent, OSX is massively broken, and has been for a long time. I have a hard time understanding how Mac fans can keep repeating that myth. Are you guys aware that what you are saying is incorrect, or do you just hope that no one will call you out on it?

Re:Don't kid yourself about OSX

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The problem isn't that it doesn't maximize, the lack of which I do find to be a glaring omission as well. The problem is that it DOES NOT set the screen to 'optimum' size.

The difference in functionality with that button and the Windows equivalent is that the Windows button either maximizes or reduces the window to whatever size it was before it was maximized or to some arbitrary default. The consistency of the button makes it more learnable, but for more advanced users, well kind of sucks. Advanced users rarely want to fill their screen with empty space to the sides of the content being displayed. It is useless to a huge number of applications.

The OS X version does the same thing except instead of always maximizing a window, the application developer decides if the specific application is one that benefits from filling the screen (like video players) or one that is more useful increasing in size until it is big enough to display all the content in the current window. This makes it a more flexible tool and brings the brain of the developer to bear on the issue, but harder for novices to learn and more importantly is not identical to Windows and thus confuses the masses of people who are trained by that system.

Objectively, as a usability expert, I think Apple's system is more flexible and offers better usability to power users, but they may have needed to do more testing with Windows users since "switchers" are such a large part of their user base. Ignoring the conditioning of Windows users may be strategic, however, as the sooner the UI breaks with Windows the less pain it will be for users overall.

UI

[falconwolf]

Like using white text on a white background

I've never seen that, though I have seen a webpage with black on black. I didn't even see that in my CP/M - DOS days.

having a green plus shrink a screen

What's so confusing about that? Oh, I get it, it doesn't mean "go"?

or using the same UI target for the trashcan and eject.

I have no idea what you're talking about. When I want to eject a drive I click on the triangle in Finder or keypress ctrl and click on the drive. I have never had a problem with either method. If you do that's your fault.

I have a hard time understanding how Mac fans

And I have a hard tyme understanding why Mac opponents are so rabid.

Of course fanbois of all stripes don't think things through, they have to start flamewars instead. Perhaps to boost their egos. Whatever, they have to flame and can't be constructive.

Falcon

Re:UI

[lennier]

or using the same UI target for the trashcan and eject.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Aww, so you're so new to Macs you don't even remember that one? So cute!

Re:UI

[falconwolf]

Aww, so you're so new to Macs you don't even remember that one? So cute!

No, I first used a Mac in 1984 or '85. From the mid '90s to about 2006 I rarely used Macs though. I mostly used MS Windows and occasionally used Linux during that tyme. In 2006 my Windows PC died and I was tired of the constant problems I had with Windows PCs, with 3 new Windows PCs I had hardware problems as well as problems with Windows a bunch of tymes in the first year, so I replaced it with a Linux PC. A year later I got a MacBook Pro. And if Apple gets bad, such as requiring software to be installed by downloading it from the Apple app store, then I'll drop Apple.

As far as MS Windows is concerned the only version I have not had trouble with is NT4. Unfortunately because the CPU in the PC it's installed on is a DEC Alpha I was not able to install much software. FX!32 was a piece of crap.

Falcon

Re:UI

[Belial6]

I've never seen that, though I have seen a webpage with black on black. I didn't even see that in my CP/M - DOS days.

You may not have seen it, but it is a good example showing that your stance that all UIs are equal is false.

What's so confusing about that? Oh, I get it, it doesn't mean "go"?

Half way. Yes, when you put a green, yellow and red circle in a row, they take on a meaning. The other half is a plus, which universally means to add, as in make more. Shrinking a screen is simply wrong behavior for a green plus. Just as using a red X to play a video would be wrong behavior for a UI. You conveniently ignore the fact that you have been called out on your false claim about it's behavior. Are you still claiming that the the verifiable behavior of the green plus does not exist? Or are you trying to pretend that it's inconsistency has not been called out?

I have no idea what you're talking about. When I want to eject a drive I click on the triangle in Finder or keypress ctrl and click on the drive. I have never had a problem with either method. If you do that's your fault.

The fact that there are other ways to accomplish the task does not make using the same UI target as both a trash can and an eject button anything but crappy UI. It was bad UI design when it was first implemented, and it is bad UI design now. I call you out for repeating a myth, which you happened to try to ignore,

I have a hard time understanding how Mac fans can keep repeating that myth. Are you guys aware that what you are saying is incorrect, or do you just hope that no one will call you out on it?

and your response is:

And I have a hard tyme understanding why Mac opponents are so rabid. Of course fanbois of all stripes don't think things through, they have to start flamewars instead. Perhaps to boost their egos. Whatever, they have to flame and can't be constructive.

Well, I guess that sums it up. You consider anyone that would criticize OSX's bad UI and point out the truth when you make false claims as being a rabid Mac opponent.

native Mac version of Open Office

[falconwolf]

Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time

The last tyme I looked Open Office still needed X11.

So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.

Just today, well yesterday first, I got a message saying there's a new version of NeoOffice with bug fixes when I started it. And I keep it up to date.

Falcon

Re:Poor .docx support?

[gravis777]

Thanks for the response. I'm not so worried about recommending it to people now. I like OO, I just like Outlook and the Ribbon interface of MS Office, and I picked it up for a decent price. It wasn't free, but I have no problem paying a REASONABLE price for software, and felt that $99 for a full office suite was a decent price. But all my friends and family are on OO, cause all they needed was a word processor that they may fire up a couple of times a year, and OO met their needs just fine.

Come to think of it, while most industries use MS, I know many more people running OO at home than MS (shoot, probably 3x as many). OO has definately made an impression on home users on FOSS software, probably more than any other product I know.

And no other software does what Outlook does?

[falconwolf]

Apparently not, and not for want of trying. I've been watching the OSS world for, what, about 14 years now? And nothing has come even close to touching Outlook/Exchange. We've had Evolution. We've had Chandler. We've had iCalendar, CalDAV, SyncML. Nothing's filled the whole solution space.

Name one thing Outlook does that no other program also does. There may not be others that do everything Outlook does but I bet different programs can be used to do everything it does.

To this day I do not comprehend how come email got world standardised via SMTP in 1982 (okay, with glaring security holes like the Sender: field, but still, interoperable), yet calendaring and contacts is still impossible to interoperate except through one defacto-standard system. Seriously, you have some kind of database, some kind of syncing system, a schema of object types... it's not rocket science, right?

I bet there are open standards but Microsoft, as well as other businesses, want to lock-in users. Outlook uses MS's proprietary file formats because it knows that that will lock-in users to Outlook. Look at how MS has tried to get its own formats accepted as ISO standards, but this it wants to collect rent on the use of them. How is a free open source project supposed to use them?

Personally I avoid all this incompatibility BS, I keep all my important email on the email server and I have had only one problem opening a document I received. When I first opened an MS Word document, created with the most recent version of Office, it was displayed mangled up. Someone suggested I upgrade Open Office. After I did the doc was displayed correctly. I tell people they will have problems with their documents if they require others to have the most recent version of the application that created it, such as MS Office. Even older versions of Office may not open documents created with a newer version.

Falcon

Neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice use X11 anymore

[falconwolf]

on a Mac.

I did not find OpenOffice Aqua before I installed NeoOffice. And as I'm comfortable with NeoOffice I see no reason to switch to either OpenOffice or LibreOffice for now. Of course that may change in the future. For instance when either one is compatible with MS Office macros but NeoOffice is not.

Falcon