Looking Back On a Year of LibreOffice

superapecommando writes "Simon Phipps, former head of open source at Sun and a backer of LibreOffice, looks at a tempestuous year for the OpenOffice fork. 'Once framed as an impetuous fork, LibreOffice has become the standard-bearer for the former OpenOffice community,' he says. 'It's far from perfect, of course. New open source projects never are and volunteer projects lack the corporate resources to make it look otherwise. But I have no doubt that it's working.'"

Comments

It feels too heavy and old

[tech4]

LibreOffice and OpenOffice both still seem really heavy. Java probably has something to do with it, but they just aren't nice to use. On top of that the UI starts to get kind of old.. I started using Office 2010 just lately and I have to say I love the Ribbon interface. It keeps useless stuff out of the screen and is fast and pleasant to use. It takes some time to get used to, but once you do there's no going back to the old clumsy interfaces.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Alex Belits]

Fuck you.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Master Moose]

LibreOffice and OpenOffice both still seem really heavy. Java probably has something to do with it, but they just aren't nice to use. On top of that the UI starts to get kind of old.. I started using Office 2010 just lately and I have to say I love the Ribbon interface. It keeps useless stuff out of the screen and is fast and pleasant to use. It takes some time to get used to, but once you do there's no going back to the old clumsy interfaces.

I agree with the Heavy and the Java bit - But no, I do not want a ribbon!

I use OO

Customisable toolbars = yes but a ribbon and no menu - No thank you.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

I started using Office 2010 just lately and I have to say I love the piles of money I get paid to astroturf like this.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[telekon]

As much as MS products disgust me in general, I have to agree they didn't fail too hard on Office 2010 (Well, I use Office 2011 for Mac when I use Office, but...). I also agree that LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org feels kinda clunky and gross. I use them all the time on Linux and OpenSolaris, but... damn, does OpenOffice make my old SunBlade 1500 crawl. And they're not that much better on a new Core i5 laptop running Debian. I don't care about the startup lag inherent in JVM bootstrapping, but I feel like they're crushed under the weight of legacy code from the StarOffice days or something. I use Java apps all the time, even god-forsaken Oracle Java apps (SQLDeveloper, anyone?) and it's not this bad. I wish them the best of luck, but I'd really rather use iWork at this point, if I'm going to use a 'productivity suite.'.

Of course, Real Programmers use vim + LaTeX + maybe Slidedown for these purposes.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Awwww, poor little butthurt open sores lunix faggot. Go get your mom to comb your neckbeard for you.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[mprinkey]

I have to agree about the heft. But I prefer the "old" style interface. I had to install Office 2007 to interact with some clients and I am completely lost. I've been using word processors since the C64 days, but this is the first time I decades that I have stared blankly at a program and had to click on every menu/button/active splotch trying to find out how to turn on Track Changes.

Of course, people can get used to the interface and maybe following the mythical transition, I will be enamored with its interface glory. But it just seems different for difference's sake...like .docx and .xlsx where.

To the LibreOffice folks, you really need to do a top-down performance/memory analysis. I like it and will continue to use it, but I don't see why it needs to be the resource hog it is.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Your user account is getting heavy and old. Cgeys > zget > mig42 > tech4. You astroturfers are disgusting.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

I give this fuck you a +1.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

The Office 07" onwards transition is hard for a month but it is actually better afterwards, you wouldn't think that prior though I didn't!

As for libre, having several themes would be a good start, at least make it look as good as office 2003. Simple things on ui design could really help e.g. common functions for common activities, such as in calc when you autofill having a MS office style icon pop up allowing you to change it (a common one I need is to fill with weekdays only on a date range, sooo hard in calc, and so basic in MS office).

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right, though. I use OpenOffice quite a bit, and will probably transition to LibreOffice soon... but it needs a UI revamp. It feels a little clunky and old. It's stable and works well; I use it instead of Word because Word started flakes out when you get 100+ pages of text and charts and graphs.

Strip out the Java, modernize the ui. It doesn't need to have a ribbon, although the ribbon is a perfectly fine ui element. Now... Calc needs a lot of work. While Write is a great replacement for Word, Calc is FAR from a complete replacement for Excel.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[oakgrove]

What am I doing wrong then that LibreOffice feels positively snappy on my Thinkpad with a T7400 core 2 duo running Ubuntu 11.10? I stick mostly to Calc and Writer. Is the problem elsewhere?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

The org I work for shells out for MSDN subscription for me. I get Office 2010 for FREE and still use LibreOffice. My needs are simple and do not include learning a new interface.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Osgeld]

I do agree it feels really heavy, and on my old shitty work pc its frankly unusable, though its a old shitty work pc

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[xeoron]

I agree no ribbon please. Instead, how about being able to print to a printer on 8.5x11 paper without causing the Ricoh printer at my work to think it is a improper paper size (despite all the settings claiming it is: with double checking printer and page-layout settings). At least I can export it to a pdf and print the pdf with any pdf viewer with no problem (I don't even have to tweak the page scaling for it to print properly so it must be some OO.o & LibbreOffice bug) just wish I did not have to do these extra steps for myself, and teach co-workers the work arounds.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[tech4]

Seriously, this is what you answer with when I criticize product honestly and constructively? You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"? They would thank me for my input.

It's no wonder open source isn't going anywhere if the answer to any criticism is "fuck you".

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[marcosdumay]

Excell 2007 is way better than 2003, what locks people into the ribbon interface. After a bit of using (and changing the default configuration) most people get used to the ribbon and stop being inconvenienced, but I still think it is not better than the old menus in any way (and for other applications - e.g. AutoCad - lack of hierarchy is killer).

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Blakey Rat]

I agree with the Heavy and the Java bit - But no, I do not want a ribbon!

Do you have a reason, or are you just terrified of change?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

The ribbon is extremely logical. If you want to edit , i.e, REVIEW a document, you click on the review tab, and you get the review ribbon. There is a great BIG button labeled track changes. The ribbon makes some things small if you use a crappy screen, but on a HD screen, all the buttons are quite large and clearly labeled. Spend some money on a 22" or larger screen. They are worth it. I use a 25.5" 1920x1200 LCD and wish I had a second one.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, right? I mean, how dare someone have an opinion and then go so far as to utter it in the comments on a weblog. The nerve!

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[MechaStreisand]

You prefer the ribbon interface? That sort of response is not surprising. Not everyone likes the ribbon - I loathe it and would love for its designers to never have a job in software again - and right now, LibreOffice hasn't been infected with it, and I would like to keep it that way.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[causality]

Seriously, this is what you answer with when I criticize product honestly and constructively? You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"? They would thank me for my input. It's no wonder open source isn't going anywhere if the answer to any criticism is "fuck you".

Sometimes, a decision must be made in terms of which side on which to err. The decision that is made says a lot about the character of the person.

I like the idea of "better for ten guilty men to go free, than for one innocent man to be punished." I really do think the latter is a much greater injustice, particularly since karma (or something like it) is very real. Others have a completely opposite viewpoint. Apparently you have encountered one of those. They would rather hassle you in case you might be an astroturfer/fanboy/etc. They haven't much concern for whether you are a real person expressing a genuine preference.

I'd rather treat you with more civility than that, knowing that you might possibly be dishonest, knowing that you might deserve to receive a hard time that I won't end up giving to you. In the absence of absolute evidence, that's how I like to do things. I'd rather you feel like you pulled one over on me. That doesn't matter to me. But it would bother me to realize that I might have been less-than-courteous to someone who really was honestly representing a real opinion.

When in doubt, I know where I stand. Apparently the other responder does as well.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[oakgrove]

It's no wonder open source isn't going anywhere

That's some pretty serious denial you got going on there.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

i was like you, cursing office '07
then, after about 4 months, I realized, much as I hate to admit it, much as it pains me...for most things it is better
however, for my particular needs, which include a lot of graphs in excel, and pasting a lot of pictures into word, there are two features i really miss (well, alot)
in excel, if you want error bars on the data points in a graph, it is impossible to get the x error bars..this used to be easy; i have a great download from one of the mvps that fixes this
second, if you paste a picture into word, and then want to group it with another picture or a textbox, its a nightmare (something to do with half way implemented graphics engines in word that differ from ppt and excell)

the funniest thing tho, is if you go no more then one or two layers deep, you get the same clunky commands that have been there since at least office2000 like the organizer for styles; ugh !!
(and don't even get me started on the need to select all, shift F9 twice to get the auto TOC and TOF to update properly.....double Ug!!

or, worst of all if you need to do a scattergram in excel, where the x axis is (say) numbers 1,2....n if the cells containing the numbers are not properly formatted the graph reverts to a line graph (so, on he x axis, 1 3 9 are spaced at distances 1,2,3 units from teh origina instead of 1,3,9 units from the origin) and excel doesn't tell you this and there is no indication that your cellls are wrong and the only way to fix it is error checking....
triple ugh FUBAR

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Your paranoia is showing. You really think those criticisms are out of line? They match up pretty closely with my experience. It's a decent office suite, but there's some aspects that need to be improved. You think anybody that says that is an astroturfer? That's not just weird; that's verging close to actual neurosis.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[oakgrove]

The criticisms aren't so much out of line. The fact that this poster has a brand new account, gets a regular first post, is almost always critical of open source and praising of Microsoft, and has a pretty much cookie cutter m.o. of the people mentioned in the GP's comment could easily lead a reasonable person to conclude that the entire purpose of the tech4 account is to astroturf. We'll see if this account flames out in a few weeks like the others did only to be followed by a new one with the same 4 or 5 letters and number username combination.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong little boy? Someone shatter your bitch ass dreams? Someone finally making you wake up to the fact that open sores is a lump of steaming shit? Are you pissed because you can't afford real software or a real computer? Are you still stuck with Linsux or Winblows?
 
FUCK YOU DICKFACE.
 
I love seeing you cunts getting all balled up over this shit. 20 years later and Apple does in 6 months what Linsux couldn't do in a decade and MS is sinking like a stone. Wow. You must be pissed. Go cry to your mommy, she'll change your diapers.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[i58]

How about I don't like it, I don't find it intuitive, and I don't see why you have to kill menus to have a ribbon. What happened to that choice thing? Why do we have to have one or the other?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Master Moose]

Terrified of change – no.

To me, the ribbon is an oversized tool taking up too much space, displaying too much information and has been change for change sake.

When it comes to supporting users. The ribbon is seen by many as a drastic change. The people who it took years to get used to the idea of looking in one place for information now need to get used to looking elsewhere.

I like the idea of a customisable toolbar (much like Office 2007+ Quick Access Toolbar) but coupled with Menus. I want less clutter on my screen, not more.

Menus keep relative functions stored in a neat and accessible way until needed. They encourage the learning of keyboard shortcuts through their underlining and display rather than having to rely on pop ups.

Menus keep relative functions stored in a neat and accessable way until needed. They encourage the learning of keyboard shortcuts through their underlining and display rather than having to rely on pop ups.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[pavon]

You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"?

No, but MS fanboys do that all the time on discussion boards. Just like happened here. It doesn't make sense to equate a random idiot on a discussion board with the actual developers of the software.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[donaldm]

LibreOffice and OpenOffice both still seem really heavy. Java probably has something to do with it, but they just aren't nice to use. On top of that the UI starts to get kind of old.. I started using Office 2010 just lately and I have to say I love the Ribbon interface. It keeps useless stuff out of the screen and is fast and pleasant to use. It takes some time to get used to, but once you do there's no going back to the old clumsy interfaces.

Yes I know this is bordering on flame-bait and is ill-informed at best but for those people who don't know and want to counter comments like this:

From the Fedora 15 DVD (size is in kB):
[root@XXXX Packages]# ls libreoffice* | grep -v libreoffice-langpack | xargs du -sk
7548 libreoffice-calc-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
79896 libreoffice-core-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
653 libreoffice-draw-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm>br> 220 libreoffice-graphicfilter-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
996 libreoffice-impress-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
66 libreoffice-kde-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
1074 libreoffice-math-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
167 libreoffice-opensymbol-fonts-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.noarch.rpm
483 libreoffice-pdfimport-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
619 libreoffice-presenter-screen-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
2399 libreoffice-ure-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
5778 libreoffice-writer-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
198 libreoffice-xsltfilter-3.3.2.2-7.fc15.x86_64.rpm
All up approx 101MB. Of course if you are going to add all the language packs then you will get over 600MB.

Doing something similar for "Java" you get about 50MB, so all up baring language packs you would install approx 152MB. To the Microsoft apologist, "Have you looked at the size of Microsoft Office recently and have you or your work paid for it?".

Liking/loving an interface is purely dependent on the person's perception so this is a reasonable comment. As for LibreOffice being clumsy well that's your opinion, many including me would disagree, especially those people who have to fight with 100 plus page documents which has been mangled by a variety of users actually running Microsoft Office.

Another counter to Microsoft apologists is to look at the size of the updates. Most packages in Linux use ether "apt-get" or "yum" and most updates use what is called "delta's" so the total size of an update would most likely be in the order of 20MB to 30MB. MS Windows updates for LibreOffice are much bigger. Also in the majority of cases LibreOffice can read most Microsoft formats and is getting better all the time. And now the clincher - it's legally free and supports ISO standards.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[PopeRatzo]

Fuck you.

I second.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[blarkon]

Won't happen. The ribbon is licensed in such a way that it can be used for everything *but* competing Office software. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(computing)

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[oakgrove]

They'll get their teeth kicked in with prior art if they even try to touch LibreOffice should the respective developers lose their minds and implement a ribbon.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Nutria]

If you want to edit , i.e, REVIEW a document

Edit != Review.

Spend some money on a 22" or larger screen.

Where do you work that They buy anything you want any time you want?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[arth1]

Do you have a reason, or are you just terrified of change?

I can't speak for the GP, but I want more screen real estate, as well as consistency without having to do different things depending on what "mode" I'm in. Ribbons defeat both.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Nutria]

Most packages in Linux use ether "apt-get" or "yum" and most updates use what is called "delta's"

Don't know about the RPM world, but there are no DEB deltas.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[TangoMargarine]

Link

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[bigstrat2003]

I'm almost positive that the GP didn't mean file size when he said heavy. Notice he said that it "feels" heavy, which means he was probably referring to the UI.

Although at least you responded with something more constructive than "fuck you", or calling the GP an astroturfer (with no evidence to support it), or simply modding the post as troll. So I give you credit for that. Some of the other posters in this thread (and the moderators) should be ashamed of themselves.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Blakey Rat]

Because every time you add a choice you double the QA time? Because sometimes the new method is so much more better than the old, that leaving the old in feels like a disservice to your customers?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[pwizard2]

Yep, I remember seeing something like the Ribbon in Homesite 1.1 as far back as 1996. (the wikipedia article confirmed it) Speaking of Homesite, that was a damn good HTML editor back in the day and the original version actually used to be freeware. I was still using the original 1.1 release up until around the time Adobe bought them out. It was still a serviceable tool once you got it interfaced with the modern browsers of that day. (IIRC Firefox was still called Firebird back then)

The Ribbon concept is ancient by computing standards. Granted, back then it was called a "tabbed toolbar" but the concept is exactly the same.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[mcavic]

I disagree. I switched from Office 2000 to OpenOffice due to bugs in Excel, and it solved my problems. Granted, OpenOffice is different in silly ways, and that makes it hard to transition. Later, I started having problems with OpenOffice, and I switched to LibreOffice, and I'm very happy with it.

The ODF format is inefficient, and that makes the load/save time pretty long. But in today's software world of "take what you can get", it really works quite nicely.

I agree that the interface is "old", but old works.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[mcavic]

To me, the ribbon is an oversized tool taking up too much space, displaying too much information and has been change for change sake.

Menus keep relative functions stored in a neat and accessible way until needed.

Yes.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had mod points, you'd be on your way to a +5 Troll. :)

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Tanktalus]

Base is probably the biggest pig. But it's somewhat understandable: more databases have a good JDBC interface than probably anything else. And it's more cross-platform - if you can get the Sybase JDBC type 4 driver on your Mac or Linux box, you can talk to that MS SQL server. Or getting the DB2 JDBC type 4 driver on a Mac. You can't get the MS SQL ODBC driver for Linux, I suspect. And you can't get the DB2 ODBC driver for Mac. (Okay, that last bit is not entirely true anymore, but was for a long time.) Thus, if Base uses Java to interface with the databases, it stands a pretty reasonable chance of just working with most db's.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Joosy]

Yeah, at first the ribbon looked weird and bloated to me, but after awhile I realized that 95% of what I needed to do was on the ribbon; it makes my occasional forays into Office-land quicker and more efficient.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Doctor_Jest]

I agree, and I'd much rather have old, stable, and not $500 (or whatever Office is priced at now.) :)

My needs for office apps at home are light, but LibreOffice/OpenOffice are hefty programs that don't "get in my way" of doing simple, mundane office-like things.

I much prefer it to the microsoft tax anyway (using OpenOffice on my Mac and LibreOffice on my Fedora machine..) The only thing I would say that needs "spit and polish" is, like you said, the ODF format. It's not a deal-breaker for me either. I am glad it is fully open as well... in the days of "planned obsolescence", it's refreshing to see software not try to pigeonhole you. (Or lasso your documents, keeping them from you because you decided it was best not to upgrade when corporation A said to.)

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[sjdaniels]

Terrified of change – no.

To me, the ribbon is an oversized tool taking up too much space, displaying too much information and has been change for change sake.

When it comes to supporting users. The ribbon is seen by many as a drastic change. The people who it took years to get used to the idea of looking in one place for information now need to get used to looking elsewhere.

I like the idea of a customisable toolbar (much like Office 2007+ Quick Access Toolbar) but coupled with Menus. I want less clutter on my screen, not more.

Menus keep relative functions stored in a neat and accessible way until needed. They encourage the learning of keyboard shortcuts through their underlining and display rather than having to rely on pop ups.

Menus keep relative functions stored in a neat and accessable way until needed. They encourage the learning of keyboard shortcuts through their underlining and display rather than having to rely on pop ups.

Yes, agree !! No Ribbon Please !! On the menus, make them more intuitive to allow what is shown on the menus. (Personally configurable).!! Not everyone was everything shown all at the same time. We do not use them all, all of the time. Without causing problems (for example purpose only) with Ipods, where you could have selecting what is shown on menu list. Thoughts anyway...

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

I use them all the time on Linux and OpenSolaris, but... damn, does OpenOffice make my old SunBlade 1500 crawl.

Was your OpenOffice compiled using gcc and GNU tools or Sun's compiler and tools?

Last time I checked, Sun's compiler and tools generated much faster code for their processors and OS, so it might make a difference.
At the time it was called "Sun One Studio", but they have renamed that product at least 4 times, so it probably has a different name by now.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Nutria]

It's unofficial, only works for Stable and was broken for 3 years.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

No, No, a thousand times no. We in Europe have had 40 years of pain from printers saying "load Letter".

Here, only a top level IT person would know that "letter" means some bizarre paper size, which you can only get by sending someone to America to get it. Dont change this till every scum sucking American knows that paper is A4 size unless you say its not , and even then, its still A4 size. if Americans weren't such primative people, they would have gone metric and had A4 paper 50 years ago.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Captain Hook]

Notice he said that it "feels" heavy

He just meant that his laptop weighs more when LibreOffice is installed

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

I just hope they have good luck with the modular approach they have been talking about because right now? it really does kinda suck. I don't think its the Java because i don't install Java with LO but it is just....slow, bad slow. i think its just the fact that it is a big old pile of nasty code going back to the days of Star office and Sun really didn't treat the old gal well. they put resources into Writer but the other really got the hind tit, and even writer seemed to be more about adding features than improving performance.

so I wish nothing but luck to the LO guys, I haven't looked at the code since OO.o 2.0 but if it is anything like OO.o 2.0 was they have their work cut out for them. But if they go for a modular approach (and remove all the Java crap) I'm sure they can give it a nice performance boost. While I don't recommend LO for SOHOs/SMBs (still too many flaky conversions between LO and MS Office) for home users it is frankly more than they'll ever need. If they can just bring up the speed i think it'd be a real winner for home users. It is already better IMHO than OO.o ever was, which considering they have only been at it a year is impressive. good job LO guys, good job.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[tudsworth]

Most of us comb our own neckbeards, you insensitive clod!

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

What prior art? IIRC the ribbon changes with what you are doing and the only things I've seen labeled as prior art are simply static tabbed toolbars. if you can show one that changes its layout contextually based on function being done by the user i'll be the first one to agree with you, but just having a bunch of icons in a box does not a ribbon make.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[TheRaven64]

It depends on the screen. I've only used the ribbon on a friend's laptop, and it wasted far too much of the screen real estate. On a desktop or a large external screen, it provides bigger targets than the menu bar (and is a little bit more discoverable), so it is probably a net win. On a laptop, to get any work done you end up hiding the ribbon, so you then need more mouse movement to unhide, select, and then hide it again than you would to go to the menu.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

Considering you're the dipshit that can't even quote correctly? Glass houses and all that. at least have the balls to use the correct quote which is "As far as the users are concerned there is no command line in Windows" and I fucking dare you to prove me wrong. Walk up to the next 100 people on the street and ask them dipshit, ask them "How do you get the command line in Windows?" and you know what they'll say? "what's command line?" because nobody uses that shit in windows dumbass, nobody.

But hey, if you want to be IN DENIAL that your OS doesn't fucking work without a 70s era term, that companies like Dell have to run their own repos even though they only offer Linux on a teeny tiny subset of hardware because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos (quality OS you got there friend), that your brand new OS got its ass beat by a decade old OS on netbooks, that major retailers like Walmart are running away from Linux as fast as it can and that even the company that started netbooks with Linux have given up on your CLI heavy bullshit, or that there is even a site dedicated To your bullshit and excuses? Who am I to deny you your illusion?

Now you be sure to tell us how its all a conspiracy of Gates and the Illuminati, that anyone who isn't sucking the koolaid must be a "sekret M$ Ninja!" getting paid the big bux to keep your magical OS down, that if folks would just heed the great RMS the world would be flowers and ponies. it couldn't be that NOBODY WANTS TO GO BACK TO THE 70s! Nope, folks love punch cards and PDPs! CLI makes your neckbeard thick and gives you gonad powerz!

Kinda funny how the ONLY success Linux has seen is Android, which google took away from the community huh? and what IS Android? Why its all GUI, no CLI, all clicky clicky wonderful, that's what it is! So have the balls to quote me correctly or are you afraid I'm right?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though Apple’s OpenDoc got shafted when they decided to implement OLE instead, according to your description, I’d say it constitutes prior art.

(Posting anonymously because I’ve already moderated here.)

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you!

-Signed
-The United States

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[John Bresnahan]

The problem with the ribbon is that it shows only the functionality I used last, not the functionality I need to use next.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

It's people like you who are dragging the quality of discussion on Slashdot down through bad moderation. If I were an admin, I would never give you any mod points.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[arose]

Blender might or might not be applicable.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, part switcher. Nobody gives a shit what you think.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Kjella]

That's some pretty serious denial you got going on there.

When it comes to the desktop and desktop software, there's plenty denial going around. Desktop Linux is stable at <1%, Firefox use is in decline and OpenOffice I don't know any good numbers on but in the Steam software survey MS Office is at 57.26% and OpenOffice at 14.63%, no idea if that includes LibreOffice or not. And at all the large companies I've been at as a consultant I've seen thousands of MS Office desktops and not a single place with OpenOffice installed. So there's some popular stuff running on top of a Linux/BSD kernel like Android, OS X and various set top boxes - you can hardly call Android open anymore - but OSS is hardly taking over the world. It's not going away either, but it remains marginal in most areas. Now for all sorts of back-end stuff where you just need a computing box, servers, HPC, supercomputers, rendering farms and so on sure. As long as you can hide it in a closet and users don't need to see it.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[oakgrove]

You must have me confused with someone else you are having this argument with as I didn't even say the word desktop.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Bob was change.

Change isn't always progress.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you should have made your own printers, if you didn't like ours.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[goarilla]

What about VLC ?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Medievalist]

No, No, a thousand times no.

Is that you, Eric Bogle?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Medievalist]

I use the command line in Windows XP nearly every day.

I don't even know the GUI equivalent of "ipconfig /all" much less use it.

I'd agree with your general point, that Windows is for people who are not technical (mass market) and linux is for highly technical folks (tiny niche market) and I certainly agree that people should not be quoted out of context... but your anti-linux rant has kind of turned me off to this whole discussion.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[oakgrove]

Your user account is a disservice to Slashdot.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Your signature has a syntax error at line 10.
Try this:
10 print "We are what we repeatedly do -- Aristottle"
20 GOTO 10

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Bert64]

Provide a skinnable UI, so people can choose between a classic interface, a ribbon interface or anything else that might work for them...
LO feels specially heavy on Mac, it seems somewhat faster on Linux tho...

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"? They would thank me for my input.

But you repeat yourself.

Q: How do they spell "Fuck You" in { Tech Support | Firefox UX development | Redmond }?
A: "Thank you for your input."

"Thank you for your input" can mean anything from an expression of gratitude for having provided a new insight, to an outright dismissal. "Fuck you" is unambiguous. Maybe if people were a little more able to say "Fuck you" to each other, perhaps we'd all understand each other better.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Bert64]

OSS is pretty much only marginal on the desktop... Everywhere else it's either significant or dominant.

As for firefox usage declining, yes it is but its being replaced by Chrome, which is also open source. OSS is not about a single product being dominant, its about people being able to switch easily if something better comes along.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Bert64]

Also a problem with the ribbon, and many other UI elements introduced by MS recently like the fatter startbar and fatter window borders... They take up a lot more vertical space than their predecessors did, and all this when modern screens are going widescreen and having less vertical space... It defies belief, soon the entire screen height will be taken up by window borders and ribbons and you won't have any space to view your document anymore.
Wider screens should be encouraging toolbars at the side, and anything at the top/bottom to be reduced in size.. Otherwise the extra width is generally wasted (editing portrait mode documents, viewing fixed-width websites etc)

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Bert64]

ODF is inefficient, but part of that is out of necessity... What makes sense to humans, is inefficient to a computer. Doing a binary dump of the internal memory structures would be fast, but would result in a file thats not human readable, very difficult to interoperate with and very difficult to maintain going forwards.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[treeves]

But your comment is that NOT EVERYONE likes the ribbon. This implies that some people DO like it.
In any case, what he said was neither offtopic nor flamebait, at least it should not be flamebait, but for the fact that some people take software preferences way too personally.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

You want to know why i'm "anti Linux" as you call it? Lies, bullshit, and hypocrisy, that's why. Take the above retard that insists on quoting me out of context and can't even get the quote correct. he was arguing that windows users use start>run to launch programs and fire up CLI every. single. day and THAT meant that Linux being so damned term heavy you had to have the link on the fucking desktop meant Linux didn't have a CLI problem.

Now I ask you, be honest, have you ever heard such delusional bullshit in your life? do you know ANYBODY that uses start>run to launch programs? hell I bet even YOU don't use start>run to launch programs! And if you are using ipconfig (which I too use daily) then you sir ARE AN ADMIN and we were talking about USERS, the masses which Linux WILL require to gain critical mass.

This is the second lie, that if a server admin does it then users MUST do it as well. For example they will bring up Powershell while ignoring every single whitepaper on MSDN has in giant letters titles like "How to manage YOUR SERVER using Powershell". Not a single thing on there for home users. Why? Because home users don't use Powershell that's why!

That is why I'm the worst nightmare of the FOSSie, which unlike a FOSS user has a moonie like devotion to their OS religion, because after trying to sell Linux and seeing what a fucked up, broken down, fiddly, badly QA'ed little POS it is? I have seen through their lies. out of a half a dozen brand new machines I tried to load Linux on, how many survived the first 6 month deathmarch upgrade? Why that would be NOT A SINGLE ONE. that's right, not one. If I would have let that shit out of my shop I would have burned my customers or had to "repair" the things (which guess what? 2 of which took over TWO WEEKS before a "fix" that was a page and a half of CLI BS I had to tweak to make work, came out) for free for the rest of their lives.

So I'm sorry but Linux is shit, and until they accept they have serious problems they need to correct, such as CLI needs to go, the 6 month deathmarch needs to be replaced or a hardware ABI needs to be implemented so drivers don't shit themselves, and the endless forum dances and CLI fixes need to go the way of the 8 track, then I will continue to point out the truth to FOSSies like MR "can't even quote correctly" above and the truth is this: Linux is equal to, but no better than, windows 98 and that's a fact. like Win 98 one often had to go to CLI because the GUI was nothing but a shell over a CLI core and things often broke and needed tweaking.

But it ain't 1998 anymore, and Linux is against Windows 7 and OSX and frankly compared to those two it is a bad joke. it is too CLI heavy, too fiddly, too dependent on fixes by the community instead of QA, and too much politics and bullshit instead of progress. Until the community accepts this it will stay where it is, which is lower than JavaME, a shitastic cell phone OS, when it comes to users. Sorry but facts don't lie, and I could wallpaper this page with link after link after link backing up everything I've said. Can they?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

My apologies. I will refrain from insulting your mom when I troll in the future.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

I've never used Blender so I don't know. Does Blender have an icon bar that changes contextually based on the actions of the user? if so you may have a winner if it came out before MSFT filed on the ribbon which I believe was 2003 or 2004. Did Blender have a contextual icon based UI at that time? Again not a 3D designer so I have NO clue on that. But if it came out after 2006 it won't count as MSFT was passing out developer previews of 2K7 by then.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[silanea]

[...] Walk up to the next 100 people on the street and ask them dipshit, ask them "How do you get the command line in Windows?" and you know what they'll say? "what's command line?" [...]

That is correct. But the next thing they usually say is "Hey, my internet is broken, can you, like, fix it or something?". Which usually means that the dipshit has to resort to the term from the 70s era to see which part of Microsoft's latest shiny fucked up this time. Quality work, my friend. Quality work.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Medievalist]

I prefer a CLI, myself. GUIs are too slow for me, I type very fast.

But no, I certainly don't use start>run to launch programs in windows.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[mcavic]

I know that's the argument for it. But you could define an efficient binary format, and any machine could implement that format. I wouldn't do a memory dump, but some kind of concise, structured file.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[MechaStreisand]

And those fools can use Office, and leave the sensible interface for the rest of us. And I never said that what he said was offtopic or flamebait, although some people are arguing that he is a shill, which could be the case.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[arose]

It generally doesn't use icons for its buttons (but that's just cosmetics), but otherwise it used to have a horizontal bar (the new version uses vertical bars) with button panels that appear and disappear based on what you are doing. I'm not entirely sure when the interface became what it is, but it certainly was like that when Blender was released as FLOSS in 2002. I haven't used the ribbon so I don't know if it is actually similar, here's a video that shows it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ow9ftNlnbo

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

But see that's my point. In Windows you can choose to use CLI if you'd like, in Linux it is strictly have to use CLI just to get the damned thing to work. Go to ANY forum and ask for a GUI fix to a common problem, like say you are having a driver issue. just try it, and watch how they curse you, insult you, and treat you like dogshit for daring to ask for a single answer that isn't "open up bash and type".

And until THAT attitude changes and they accept the fact that terminals for non admins are as dead as disco and bell bottoms then Linux will stay right where it is at dead last, and rightly so. Instead they will delude themselves into thinking users run everything by going start>run, that every Windows user uses CLI daily, that all Windows machine BSOD and are infected, honestly its kinda sad.

That is why I call them FOSSies to separate them from FOSS users because FOSSies are like Moonies in their total delusional state of mind. Any post that isn't "gee Biff, isn't Linux perfect? why it sure is Skip, and RMS' farts smell like flowers and cured the ozone hole!" will be automatically downmodded, any person who doesn't say the above, no matter how delusional in the face of facts, will be labeled the FOSSie equivalent of nigger, that is of course troll, and anyone that has a different opinion HAS to be a "M$ Ninja Spy!" intent on destroying their vital essence.

You know what the definition of insanity is? its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Linux was dead last 20 years ago, it was dead last 10 years ago, wanna guess where it will be in 10 years if they refuse to change and instead insist the world go back to the days of punch cards and terminals? Hell even in servers the numbers are dropping, with the last I saw had Linux at 35% and falling, why? Because as a Linux admin friend told me "if you place a Linux and Windows admin side by side, and give them a task the Linux admin has done repeatedly? the Linux guy will win. if you give them a task that the Linux guy has never done? before he is done dealing with man pages and searching Google the Windows guy will already be at lunch, having finished AGES ago."

And THAT my friend is why terminals are NEVER coming back. GUIs reward exploration and learning of new tasks, CLI is strictly for repetition and copypasta. And the vast majority of consumers, those people that Linux desperately needs if it is EVER gonna get above dead last? They don't sit around reading man pages and doing copypasta and furthermore they NEVER will. When you point this out? suddenly it'll be "well...uh uh... We don't wanna win anyway Mr M$ Ninja Shill dirty man!" while of course ignoring every page on /. cheering when anybody actually uses Linux for anything. Just sad really, how delusional these fanbois get.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Medievalist]

I'm not going to defend people being rude and unhelpful in forums; I've seen too much of that myself. I always wonder why those people don't find something better to do with their time.

GUIs reward exploration and learning of new tasks, CLI is strictly for repetition and copypasta.

Hmm. To me, GUIs are just menus. They let you select from things other people created. CLIs, on the other hand, are where creativity is focused into the act of creation - it is not possible to create a new computing paradigm without typing characters in a text editor or near equivalent. True innovation in computer science comes from programming, which is a fundamentally character-based, non-graphical activity. The only way to "program" without typing code is not really programming, it's just gluing together code other people created.

I like to be able to do these kinds of commands:
omshowu -n local-network-id |gawk -F/ '/^SIS/{print $4}'

or this:
gawk 'BEGIN{FS=":";Ct=0;getline;Ts=$3};{if ($3!=Ts){print $3;Ts=$3;Ct++}}' /var/lib/ldap/replica/slurpd.status

I occasionally type out commands that line-wrap three or four times, but would not be possible at all in any GUI.

That said, for every programmer there are probably a thousand users. So focusing on the needs of the larger group is not stupid. And as you say, GUIs are very useful for flattening a learning curve, because they directly and immediately reward exploration. GUIs are also very good for graphic arts and similar non-character based end-user activities.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

But you just proved my point since you already know those commands it is simply repetition. there is no way in hell you just sat down at a CLI of an unfamiliar OS and said "Hmmm...how do I do this task I've never done before? I know its BEGIN{FS=":";Ct=0;getline;Ts=$3};{if ($3!=Ts){print $3;Ts=$3;Ct++}}' /var/lib/ldap/replica/slurpd.status!!"

In fact if you didn't sit down before you EVER did a single thing and spend hours pouring over man pages or programming books, so you understood not only the command itself, but how each of those commands actually work and tie into each other? Well I might as well give you an OS in Russian for all the good it would do you.

And while what you aid is true that the GUI only has what the developer thought of computers have been around for decades so ALL of the tasks that a good 90% will need? Should already have a GUI up and running. if not its a giant FAIL which sadly is where Linux is right now. Linux is still at its core a CLI OS that has a thin GUI shell, like Win9X was back in its day. And like Win9x often the ONLY way to get anything done is bypass the GUI completely because frankly it doesn't work. Is there a GUI to find and install drivers? How about a GUI for video errors similar to windows safe mode? Hell even with the wireless network GUI I found that often the damned thing wouldn't work or the settings wouldn't stick, guess what I got told when asking for help? "Oh you shouldn't use THAT thing, you should use " followed by 3 pages of CLI crapola. could I, with over 30 years of computer experience, do it? yes but why would I want to? Could my customers? Not a chance in hell.

And THIS is why Linux is stuck. You are right that for every programmer there is a 1000 users but they will NOT listen.Currently they already have all the "fight the power!" types, the only other ones that could pick up the needed CLI experience left would be the Windows power users and frankly they don't have any problems with Windows, so why should they switch? The vast majority of PC users are just like my dad. they know how to point and click, if you are lucky they know how to call up a help screen, that's it. Do you HONESTLY think those people would EVER have a prayer in Linux? Of course not, but those like the FOSSie that runs around here misquoting me will argue up and down those people are just dying to learn forum dances and CLI horseshit, when reality couldn't be farther from the truth.

I sell PCs for a living, so I deal with them 6 days a week. in its current form Linux is NOWHERE near ready for the masses. it is simply too CLI heavy, too little GUI. But sadly instead of having focus groups and user tests and seeing this is the case and working to make things easier for them, instead you get those like the one above you that insult if you are point out that you will NEVER get the world to go back to 70s terminals and reading man pages. this isn't 1975 and the average user isn't a programmer anymore. But instead they hang onto this delusion, like RMS does. Have you seen him at talks? He calls everyone "hackers" like it is 75 and he is at a computer club meeting. Sad really, but its that kind of delusional thinking that has guaranteed Linux a dead last position. And I think its just a damned shame, as there are plenty that could use its ability to run on older hardware and free upgrades.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

Nope, not prior art. the ribbon is contextual, that is changing based on the user picking a function. for example if you start typing a doc the font function becomes front and center, use the shortcut on the keyboard to add headers and footers and the bibliography tools come to the forefront.

So you see what the ribbon is doing is basically guessing what you are doing in the actual program area and then trying to make the controls that you are most likely to need become the main area controls. There is actually a video on MSDN (sorry I couldn't find the link ATM I'm trying to do 6 things at once here at the shop) where they explain how they took thousands of videos and screencaps of people using the products and then put all that data into a spreadsheet to find out what the most used tools for any particular task was. They are using the same approach for the Win 8 explorer ribbon and for example they found more than 90% of folks in explorer use cut/copy/paste when in explorer so those will be up front unless you do a lot of another function, lets say move. then move will be the function in the center area.

While I preferred the menu simply because I've used Office enough i know where everything is, I can see what they are going for and its pretty damned smart. simply find out what folks use the most, make those controls the largest and easiest to hit, then pay attention to what the user does and further customize the controls based on their most used tools. For all folks talk of prior art I frankly have never seen a "learning menu" based on icons before the ribbon, especially not one that learned and adapted with the user.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Medievalist]

there is no way in hell you just sat down at a CLI of an unfamiliar OS and said "Hmmm...how do I do this task I've never done before? I know its BEGIN{FS=":";Ct=0;getline;Ts=$3};{if ($3!=Ts){print $3;Ts=$3;Ct++}}' /var/lib/ldap/replica/slurpd.status!!"

I grabbed that specific command out of the shell history file on one of the linux systems where I have root, so you're right about this particular instance; it was not an unfamiliar OS. I originally composed it because no tool (GUI or otherwise) existed that would find replica disynchrony in a massively redundant multi-host multi-OS OpenLDAP installation that was designed and built before syncrepl existed. So I wrote one on the fly, out of my head, which is the raw power of CLI at work - it's not simple replication or "copypasta", it's a conduit for creativity.

And I've done the same sort of thing on OS/390, OS/400, and Apollo Domain operating systems without any training whatsoever from anyone. It is what I do, it is the special skill set that earns my daily bread. It the case of the Apollo system, I actually had to hack the entire OS from a cold start - no passwords, no manuals, no prior experience, no Internet, just hardware console access and the power of the scientific method. It took three weeks, so roughly 120 hours. I got root on the third day, as I recall, but it was a long time ago. I must have rebooted that system a thousand times, trying to find a keyboard interrupt that would stop bootstrap before a password prompt came up.

Now, in the case of the command we quoted, I have internalized the entire syntax of the gawk language, yes, certainly, just as an author internalizes the structure of a natural language. You are right about that too; it is mostly just rote memorization, no different from learning how to unmount a disk drive in the MacOS GUI. But when a poet makes a poem (or a coder writes code) he creates something new - when a person learns to unmount a disk, he hasn't created anything, he just learned a trick.

There's a level beyond mere memorization (that is not reachable from a GUI) that involves building new things. The composite recurve bow is not a trivial restatement of a bent tree branch, it's a creative work. Yes, the bowyer needed to memorize lots of tricks, like how to select wood for a task and how to bend horn and how to clean sinew, but that doesn't reduce the thing he created to a mere set of selections from a mental menu.

Is there a GUI to find and install drivers?

Yes, some versions of Ubuntu at least have this.

How about a GUI for video errors similar to windows safe mode?

Most distros use the CLI for "safe mode" but yes this exists too.

Hell even with the wireless network GUI I found that often the damned thing wouldn't work...

I have never seen a linux networking GUI that wasn't an abomination that should be staked through the heart and buried at a crossroads, but I think there will eventually be one. Someday. It might even end up being a high version of NM but I truly doubt it.

I use linux as a tool to do other things, and have no interest in selling anything to a mass market. So while your opinion of linux is clearly valid from your point of view as a retail systems provider, I personally don't care if nobody but me finds it useful. And I think that's what you are running into - people like RMS (and to a lesser extent, me) aren't interested in achieving your goals, because we don't share them.

Your dislike of rude and inconsiderate people in forums is understandable. I got turned off to *nix in general in the 1970s because of the attitude and behaviour of people who I'd asked for help. That turned out to be a good thing in the end, since now I don't care about OSes any more, I just use whatever is in front of me at the moment.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[arose]

Blenders interface is most certainly contextual, it isn't guessing, but it is only presenting the relevant functions depending on what you pick (that's the icon bar above the tools) and what you do. You didn't mention learning before though, Blender doesn't do that. OTOH does that mean that a non-learning contextual ribbon would be clear to implement?

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[hairyfeet]

A non learning ribbon would just be a pile of icons that change based on what task you are doing so I'm thinking yes, that wouldn't be covered. if you have to pick a button before the icons change? that is just calling another MDE so that has plenty of prior art. It is the learning aspect that would bite you in the ass, so if it is strictly a bunch of icons in a bar? i don't see how that could be covered.

Re:It feels too heavy and old

[Anonymous Coward]

You act just like a little kid.

Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers are genetically inferior. The more niggers and spics there are in a country the lower that country's GDP. Give me just ONE FUCKING counter-example. I dare you. You can't do it. It isn't possible. How can you use the old standard excuse of "racism" to explain why an all-black nation can't be prosperous? It doesn't work. When blacks are running things things go to shit. When it is blacks and more blacks and no whites in control of anything how can that possibly be racism? It can't, you fucking liars.

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Correlation =/= Causation

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers are genetically inferior.

Why don't you go and say that to a group of, say, a half dozen of these genetically inferior niggers, and then kick all their arses when they come at you? Hell, I'd pay to watch that.

Just make sure your health insurance is paid up, because you'll be on it for the rest of your life.

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers are genetically inferior.

Why don't you go and say that to a group of, say, a half dozen of these genetically inferior niggers, and then kick all their arses when they come at you? Hell, I'd pay to watch that.

Just make sure your health insurance is paid up, because you'll be on it for the rest of your life.

A mountain lion is genetically inferior to a man. But the mountain lion would win a fair fight against a man. And the ebola virus is genetically inferior to a man, but the ebola virus would destroy the man's health with ease. This proves nothing. It is an appeal to force. It is false "might makes right" non-logic.

See this is the problem with you libs who insist that everybody is completely equal despite the staggering evidence to the contrary. None of you know how to articulate a point. None of you understand the most basic things about logic and reason. You just get all hypersensitive and emotional and you think your venomous passion makes you correct. Like a menstruating woman, you think anything you feel so strongly about must be right. Well go put a tampon in there because you're full of shit and couldn't possibly take me on in any kind of factual debate.

If anything you are proving that the niggers are violent and savage. That doesn't make them evolved and advanced. It makes them primitive and stupid. That was already obvious. Just visit any inner-city American ghetto. They kill each other constantly. Black on black crime is far higher than white on black crime has ever been. Oh by the way. Those same niggers you defend and love so much? Go into their ghettos sometime. You think they will reward your loyalty? Nope. They will be quite hostile to any "cracka" they see. Your liberal love of niggers won't stop them.

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but the outcome would be entertaining for the rest of us.

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers are genetically inferior.

Why don't you go and say that to a group of, say, a half dozen of these genetically inferior niggers, and then kick all their arses when they come at you? Hell, I'd pay to watch that.

Just make sure your health insurance is paid up, because you'll be on it for the rest of your life.

So, what you're saying is that blacks are genetically inferior and prone to violence. Hmm, great counterpoint!

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers are genetically inferior.

Why don't you go and say that to a group of, say, a half dozen of these genetically inferior niggers, and then kick all their arses when they come at you? Hell, I'd pay to watch that.

Just make sure your health insurance is paid up, because you'll be on it for the rest of your life.

So, what you're saying is that blacks are genetically inferior and prone to violence. Hmm, great counterpoint!

Well, non-blacks are no better.

Re:Send 'em back to Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

don't most of these genetically inferior niggers you're referring to have caucasian, hispanic, and native american blood in their veins though? some of them are more light skinned than others. if it is a genetic problem, then perhaps we should be encouraging crossbreeding between them and other races! dilute it out the way red hair or pure northern european features are being bred out.

Java Not Required

[CritterNYC]

Java is only used for the Base database utility and a number of new document wizards plus a few other minor bits. The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components, so Java has nothing to do with normal usage of the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool or drawing programs. Ribbon use is subjective. Like many others, I hate it. It's clumsy and harder to find what you need.

Re:Java Not Required

[Blakey Rat]

Hah. A year ago I tried it, after all these re-assurances that it doesn't require Java. What's the absolute first thing it pops up after being installed?

"OpenOffice requires a Java Runtime to perform this task"

If it actually doesn't require Java, like you and so many others claim, it's doing a piss-poor job of working without it. Me? I'll believe my own eyeballs: OpenOffice requires Java.

Re:Java Not Required

[Nutria]

A year ago

How ironic that CritterNYC said that "The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components", you complain about OpenOffice.org from one year ago and this topic is on the of LibreOffice.

Your FAIL is Big, Fat, Hairy and smells like Stupid.

Use Goatse.cx office

[Anonymous Coward]

Free as in anal sores, and installs on gentoo, arch and other neck beard approved operating systems. Also comes with Rob Malda Penis shaped Dragon Dildo.

Lotus Symphony

[sr180]

After seeing a post on here, Ive switched to Lotus Symphony, which I have been much happier with. It feels like a much better replacement to me, and I now use it full time over Open or Libre Office.

Re:Lotus Symphony

[contrapunctus]

don't you have to give your name/email to IBM and agree to the license before you can use Lotus Symphony?

Re:Lotus Symphony

[Osgeld]

yes, but since they dont check on that

Eat
Mydong
youdontneedmyemail@douche.com

=)

Re:Lotus Symphony

[contrapunctus]

yeah but it's the principle of the thing....

Re:Lotus Symphony

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Symphony working wel with your existing pivot tables?

Is Symphony running your macro? What languages are they using for macro?

Re:Lotus Symphony

[bigbigbison]

IBM has donated their code to Apache and the OpenOffice.org project so hopefully IBM's code will make it into OO.o and perhaps LibreOffice http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/ibm-throws-its-source-code-and-support-behind-openoffice/9240

Java?

[causality]

Strip out the Java, modernize the ui.

Maybe someone with more real-world experience using Java can clarify this for me.

When I look into Java's performance, I see lots of cases where it's "nearly as fast as compiled C/C++ code" etc. The (narrowly-defined) numbers do look pretty good. Yet I have a similar experience: most applications I use which are partially or wholly written in Java feel slow, particularly in terms of UI responsiveness.

Is this actually a contradiction? Is there anyone who incorporates Java into a major desktop application and (in terms of performance) does it well?

Re:Java?

[MechaStreisand]

The problem is generally that Java applications become huge and bloated because the language is so verbose and inexpressive. See Steve Yegge's essay on the topic.

Re:Java?

[oakgrove]

Well, coming from a Python coder's perspective, I'll put it like this. Python's runtime isn't the fastest but the GUI toolkits used with it are usually either written in C (Gtk) or C++ (Qt) and my Python programs appear to run much faster than the equivalent Java program using its native Swing because the ui is just so much snappier. It really must be mostly a graphical toolkit issue. Anecdotally, Android apps are generally coded in Java (albeit Dalvik bytecode) and the applications on my Nexus S run blazingly fast.

Re:Java?

[Yosho]

Is there anyone who incorporates Java into a major desktop application and (in terms of performance) does it well?

The problem here isn't with Java, it's with Swing (Java's native GUI toolkit). Swing is terribly slow. Applications written in Java with another toolkit, such as SWT or Qt, are fine. Azureus, for example, is a fairly popular BitTorrent client that is written in Java/SWT. (to be fair, the application itself is pretty bloated, but that has little to do with Java and more to do with the developers cramming in every feature under the sun)

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why IBM wrote SWT. Swing was too slow when they were building the first version of Eclipse. SWT gives you a "mostly" platform independent API to native widgets

Re:Java?

[russotto]

When I look into Java's performance, I see lots of cases where it's "nearly as fast as compiled C/C++ code" etc. The (narrowly-defined) numbers do look pretty good.

Benchmarks lie. That's really all there is to it.

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Python's not a real language. Please never speak again. To anyone. Ever.

Re:Java?

[oakgrove]

Why isn't it a real language?

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't create a stand alone app. That makes it a non-language. You're just a script kiddie.

Re:Java?

[blueg3]

Are you claiming that py2exe doesn't exist? Or are you trying to make a larger, grossly misinformed point about the architecture of modern computation?

Re:Java?

[oakgrove]

What can your standalone application actually do that my Python script can't? A python script requiring a runtime is a pretty silly criticism when ultimately everything on your computer requires something else. I get paid for results and for me, python gets me those results and fast. And if there is a hotspot in my code that requires more speed than python offers, I just write it in C. With Python, C libraries can be seamlessly imported and used. It's the best of both worlds.

Re:Java?

[ThorGod]

You can't create a stand alone app. That makes it a non-language. You're just a script kiddie.

I'll just put this out there, who cares? Even in "The C Programming Language" K&R state it's more important to have good, working code than fast code.* Only after 'it works' should you worry about optimization. So, if you're not optimizing your code, what's to stop you from prototyping in python? Or, for that matter, doing any of the many other tasks that don't require byte code. (For instance, python + sqlite work GREAT as a replacement to excel/access. There's also scipy.)

So what if you can't write microsoft access in python? Who would WANT to rewrite access if access wont quite do the job?

Also, there are ways to make stand-alone python applications. But, again, why tie yourself down to a specific OS?

*This might be the wrong book for the right quote, but it's still sound coding mentality. Get it right, and THEN get it fast, if it's even a task you'll do more than a couple times!

Re:Java?

[StormyMonday]

As others have pointed out, the main Java GUI (SWING) is a real pig. This is a result of Java's "compile once, run anywhere" philosophy colliding with different OS GUIs.

The other problem is that Java's startup time is ridiculous. Load the VM, load the code, load the libraries (*lots* of libraries!), verify the libraries and the code, initialize the libraries (lots of .properties files!) and the code, and then run.

Once the startup hooplah is over, Java code is quite reasonably fast. Benchmarks either minimize the startup time by, say, running 10,000 iterations of a loop, or eliminating it entirely by using "flying start" techniques.

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

English is a language.
Python is a language.
You are a moron.

Re:Java?

[Kjella]

The problem here isn't with Java, it's with Swing (Java's native GUI toolkit). Swing is terribly slow. Applications written in Java with another toolkit, such as SWT or Qt, are fine. Azureus, for example, is a fairly popular BitTorrent client that is written in Java/SWT. (to be fair, the application itself is pretty bloated, but that has little to do with Java and more to do with the developers cramming in every feature under the sun)

Personally I've found that application horribly slow to respond and extremely resource intensive, most like any other Java app I run into. uTorrent FTW, or KTorrent when I was on KDE. The only Java app I know to run well is a huge web-based server system, and it works like a 747 - horribly big to get off the air, but can carry hundreds of people as easily as the first one. The enterprise stuff works, as desktop software it's still meh. I use a lot of C++/Qt though and that's snappy, haven't run into a Java/Qt application yet - examples?

Re:Java?

[m50d]

Applications written in Java with another toolkit, such as SWT or Qt, are fine

Do you have an example? The two desktop applications written in java that I'm aware of are Azureus and Eclipse; neither uses swing, but both are slow and bloated. Heck, I don't think I've ever seen a java application that didn't need a splash screen.

Re:Java?

[Joe Tie.]

That's kind of the point though. There's every reason to expect a python script to be slow and a program written in java to be fast. But that's seldom the experience in real world applications.

Re:Java?

[TheRaven64]

I'm no fan of Python, but that's a strange definition. You can embed the entire Python interpreter (which is shockingly bad code - anything that generates valgrind errors before you even get to main() should not be allowed anywhere near a CPU) in an executable, along with the code. You can compile it to Java or .NET bytecode, making it as stand-alone as any application that requires a VM. You could probably compile it to native code - Unladen Swallow did this with a JIT, but there's no reason why you can't use the same code paths to statically compile. I've written a Smalltalk implementation that has a static compiler, and Python is no more dynamic.

Most of the time you don't create a stand-alone C/C++ application either. It's very rare to statically link to the C standard library or the STL implementation (on some platforms, statically linking to libc isn't even supported to make it easier to change kernel interfaces), and unless you're writing an embedded application you're adding late-bound dependencies on the kernel.

Re:Java?

[TheRaven64]

Azureus on OS X had the distinction of being the first app I've seen with a CPU leak. If you started it up, it would gradually climb (over about a period of 2 hours) to using 100% of the CPU. Even if you didn't start any torrents or touch the UI. If that's what Java developers think 'not slow and bloated' means, then I'm glad I don't have a JVM installed anymore...

Re:Java?

[TheRaven64]

More to the point, creating a fair benchmark is really hard. Microbenchmarks are really misleading. For example, C++ does really well on some because templates turn into inlined functions. This doesn't scale though, because lots of inlined functions also mean that your code is bigger and so you start getting instruction cache misses, which cripple performance. You can write a small library using templates and again using virtual functions, and the version using templates will be much faster in microbenchmarks, but the one using dynamic dispatch and real function calls may be a lot faster in a big program (but slower in a small program).

When you're writing a small benchmark, do you write the idiomatic code, or the fastest possible implementation? Optimising at one level can often make it impossible to optimise at others. In early versions of Java, using final on class and methods made things faster because it allowed the VM to skip a lot of the dynamic lookup (you're never going to be calling a subclass method). Adding final, however, meant that you couldn't add a subclass that was optimised for your specific use. For example, String is final in Java, so you can't create a string that lazily fetches characters from a remote location. The same happens in C++. The implementation of std::string is inflexible, so most C++ toolkits create their own string class, but these are all incompatible, so you end up copying strings when you pass across a library boundary. This optimisation at the low level makes it hard to do high-level optimisations. STL is riddled with this kind of thing.

Re:Java?

[Osiris Ani]

Is there anyone who incorporates Java into a major desktop application and (in terms of performance) does it well?

The Java version of the [now-Symantec] Veritas NetBackup administration console is a reasonably responsive implementation.

Re:Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you propose writing code that compiles to a binary that can be burned into ROM?
A program that requires a python runtime (installed by default on many OS) isn't really very different from one that requires any of the other functions provided by an OS.. Even apps written in C typically require the C library and various services provided by the kernel to run, and even an OS kernel requires services provided by the firmware and/or bootloader.

Re:Java?

[Yosho]

Do you have an example?

Deinonychus and VirgoFTPare a mail client and FTP client, respectively, that are written in Java/SWT and are both pretty snappy.

Re:Java?

[Yosho]

I use a lot of C++/Qt though and that's snappy, haven't run into a Java/Qt application yet - examples?

Unfortunately, there aren't very many out there. The ones I've had experience with are generally specialized proprietary applications. I know there's an open source 3D modeling application called Moonlight|3D, and I don't know how powerful it is compared to other applications, but the interface is pretty snappy, at least.

For Java/SWT examples, there's also VirgoFTP (an FTP client) and Deinonychus (a mail client).

Re:Java?

[MechaStreisand]

I've encountered the same behavior with Azureus. What turned out to be causing it was the garbage collector taking up more and more time as the memory in use crept closer and closer to the heap size. The "solution" was to increase the heap size so it could use the gig of memory it wanted to.

Eventually I switched to qbittorrent, which has its flaws, but it never does that to me.

Great improvements this year

[vossman77]

I switched immediately after the fork and have been really happy. I had to use NeoOffice before because OpenOffice is completely unusable on MacOSX.

Re:Great improvements this year

[Confusador]

I've been happy with it, enough that I'd say that it's the best thing to happen to OpenOffice.org in years. But seriously, it's been a year and they still haven't come up with a decent name? The whole 'Libre' thing was supposed to be temporary!

*sigh* I know, this is the same type of folks who still think the GIMP is well named.

Re:Great improvements this year

[TheRaven64]

It's okay, you never actually need to refer to it by name, just use the abbreviation. LO.o, pronounced loo, is less of a mouthful. As in 'I'm going to open your document in the loo'.

don't get open/libre

[cinnamon colbert]

over the years, I've downloaded open/libre 3 or 4 times, and each time I come to the same conclusion: it just isn't anywhere near as good as MS office; fewer features, not as well organized, etc. and I just checked, on ebay you can get a office 2003 suite for ~40$ +S&H, which considering you will use it every day for a year or two, ain't much. I admit, sometimes my docs have some formatting, like TOC, TOF, cross refs, paragraph styles, etc, and I do a lot of graphs in excel, so maybe libre just isn't right for me, but I just don't get it. IT just doesn't have the features. am I missing something ?

Re:don't get open/libre

[Nimey]

It's free, it's cross-platform, and it's good enough for many tasks.

It certainly could use improvements in many areas, but it does OK.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Open Office (and now LibreOffice) exclusively for my home publishing needs. I've published several books, all with TOC, cross references, comments, alphabetized indexes, using paragraph styles, in-line images, tables, and so forth. I use calc extensively to parse data, and I find it far more convenient to use and less buggy/inconsistent than MS Office. Try copying something in Excel, pasting it, then hitting enter... your copied text is inexplicably removed from the clipboard. What about having multiple spreadsheets open side by side? MS Excel makes that painful. Whenever I have the choice, I use LibreOffice.

Re:don't get open/libre

[obarthelemy]

I semi-agree with that. It's OK for 95% of what I need (revisions printing is a lot less nice than MS Office). What kills it for me is the Office import/export issues, which prevent using it when I know docs will travel around. MS must be happy, that's what they always wanted.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

So you use it because other people are using it? I'm just different I guess, and I try to avoid the whole group-think mindset.

I use OpenOffice because it supports ODF and I want my documents to be always accesible without the forced-upgrade Microsoft is doing with .doc.

On top of that, MS-Office will read ODF files now, but doesn't write them well at all.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Nutria]

The ribbon bar in Excel and Word 2007 just aggravate the shit out of me. It's why I stick with go-OO 3.2.1 on Windows.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Nutria]

So you use it because other people are using it?

Well, yes. Unless you're a hermit, doing -- within reason -- what other people do has some pretty darned good merits, us being social animals and whatnot.

I use Linux exclusively at home, but at work it's Windows all the way. Why? Because *They* say so, and They use Exchange, and a VPN and make us PGP encrypt all laptop disks. So if I want a job, I -- within the law -- do what everyone else does.

I'm just different I guess, and I try to avoid the whole group-think mindset.

Actually, you appear to be a know-it-all Uni student.

Re:don't get open/libre

[hedwards]

It only seems that way if you're used to using Office. I'll use Office for a short period of time now and again and the organization is pretty ridiculous. It's not unusual for me to spend 20 minutes or more figuring out how to get it to stop autocorrecting things. I forget where that particular thing is located, but last time I checked it was absolutely buried.

As for TOC, you can do that in Libreoffice, same goes for paragraph styles. I'm not sure about the other bits though.

As for buying an old copy of 2003, good luck with that. It's not going to be exporting or importing files from elsewhere without a 3rd party utility or greatly restricting the use of newer features. I've tried interoperating with old versions in the past, and it's pretty much always been primitive. Stick to the basics and it should be fine, but if there's anything new you might well end up with squares or weird formatting.

Re:don't get open/libre

[donaldm]

You don't appear to have used LibreOffice recently. I work in what many perceive as a Microsoft exclusive environment yet I don't have any issues with using LibreOffice. As for buying Office 2003 for $40 on EBay you do realise that most Microsoft products are tied to the original purchaser so in many ways you would $40 better off by just joining the green parrot brigade. :)

Also Office 2003 is something like 8 years older than the latest release of LibreOffice. Of course if you like the old MS Office then fine by me.

Re:don't get open/libre

[arth1]

I use Open Office (and now LibreOffice) exclusively for my home publishing needs. I've published several books, all with TOC, cross references, comments, alphabetized indexes, using paragraph styles, in-line images, tables, and so forth.

I'm surprised by the amount of people who use a page-centric application for something like writing books, whether it be Word or Write. If it works for you, great, but to me it seems like painting with Crayons and Sharpies because that's what you have.
No offense meant.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay away from MS Office on ebay. The vast majority of software is either pirated or OEM (not legal for resale). I got burnt buying a sealed box that from the images looked legit, with the seller having very positive feedback; however, when received and on closer inspection, the box and CD were a very good Chinese counterfeit, but counterfeit nonetheless.

Re:don't get open/libre

[afabbro]

It has one giant feature that MS Office does not have: you're not forced to run Windows or MacOS.

Re:don't get open/libre

[afabbro]

So you use it because other people are using it? I'm just different I guess, and I try to avoid the whole group-think mindset.

The parent said he couldn't always use LO/OO because export/import isn't perfect and his documents sometimes travel to those who are not using OO/LO.

So are you seriously giving him grief about a "group-think mindset"?

Welcome to society. Not all of us are like you, a hermit completely cut off from all mankind and free to use only our preferred software. Sometimes we have to work collaboratively with other people and the most commonly used software sometimes wins.

Re:don't get open/libre

[afabbro]

Stay away from MS Office on ebay. The vast majority of software is either pirated or OEM (not legal for resale). I got burnt buying a sealed box that from the images looked legit, with the seller having very positive feedback; however, when received and on closer inspection, the box and CD were a very good Chinese counterfeit, but counterfeit nonetheless.

This message brought to you by Microsoft. Please people - before you bid, remember that Microsoft has revenue targets to meet.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Zontar The Mindless]

I don't see you suggesting anything better nor do I see you mentioning anything *about* writing books that suggests to me that you've actually done it.

I've written and/or edited a number of them.

I've actually grown to prefer DocBook XML, which lets me concentrate on content and semantics without being distracted by styles, but OOO has worked just fine for this.

Therefore, I have to wonder whether you're just trolling.

No offence meant, of course.

Re:don't get open/libre

[TheRaven64]

I've written four books now, and I used LaTeX for all of them. For semantic markup, clean output, and getting out of my way and letting me think about the content, I've not found anything better. Inserting a code listing, for example, into OpenOffice is painful. In LaTeX it's a single command to import a set of lines from the file, syntax highlight it, and insert it as a floating section with a cross reference and an entry in the table of contents.

Re:don't get open/libre

[TheRaven64]

He may be a shill, but he's not wrong. Microsoft isn't the only company whose products get this treatment on eBay. Search for Adobe products, for example. A huge amount of pirated big name software is sold on eBay. If you're going to pirate it, just grab the torrent, don't make some criminal richer in the process...

Re:don't get open/libre

[TheDarkMaster]

Well, for you have an idea, LibreOffice can not even render the text properly on my linux box. (and yes, freetype is correctly installed and KDE displays perfect fonts). And OpenOffice is even worst in this job.

Re:don't get open/libre

[arth1]

I don't see you suggesting anything better nor do I see you mentioning anything *about* writing books that suggests to me that you've actually done it.

1: I did not want to turn this thread into a slugfest about which program was best. I still don't. I mentioned the type of writing application, and expect those interested to do their own research and not take my word for it.

2: I have a well-established alias here, which I prefer not be linked to my writing. But since you seem intent on pulling rank, I've written both technical articles and manuals, as well as short stories and a novel. But that's rather irrelevant.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

? cygwin

Re:don't get open/libre

[Malc]

I love the ribbon bar; I feel way more productive than with the old crappy menus and toolbars. OO looks and feel more like Word for Windows 2.0. It's really jarring using it, but a really good reminder of what people hated about WFW.

Re:don't get open/libre

[HeckRuler]

The download takes a few minutes rather then a full week. That +S&H takes a while you know.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't figure out how to turn off auto correction in less than a minute WITHOUT even using google to look it up, I wonder if you have trouble remembering to breathe and how you're even still alive.

PS:

File->Options->Proofing->AutoCorrect Options

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised by the amount of people who use a page-centric application for something like writing books, whether it be Word or Write. If it works for you, great, but to me it seems like painting with Crayons and Sharpies because that's what you have.
No offense meant.

You would be less surprised if you knew how powerful the style sheets in writer are.
Much more versatile than what word gives you. Not everyone needs quarkxpress or adobe indesign to publish a nice looking book. And for those that need fine typographic control you have Scribus, XeTex or pdf-TeX before we need to approach quark or adobe.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Ritchie70]

Agreed. I hated the ribbon at first because I was lost, but now that I'm used to it I like it a lot.

It is harder to do keyboard shortcuts, though. (I know, it tells you, etc etc but I can't get the hang of it.)

Re:don't get open/libre

[arth1]

You're still talking page-centric as in DTP.

Having worked with typesetting, I know that few things made me groan more than writers who tried to format their text to fit "pages", or thought that PC typography was anything like a Linotron. Typesetting and layout isn't the job of the writer.
Now I'm at the other side of the table, and write articles, short stories and novels, and using more sane tools lets me focus on the text and references without worrying about the physical layout.

Re:don't get open/libre

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would autocorrect be under "proofing" ? Surely you would want autocorrect at the stage where you are actually inputting text, not at the later proofing stage?

Working For Me

[Bob9113]

I still have OOo on my Linux box, and switched my Mac to LibreOffice a month or two ago. I don't spend a huge amount of time in Libre on the Mac, but it worked great for one 250 page spec document and a few smaller pieces.

All That I use

[rueger]

For years I always installed OpenOffice, but always wound up relying on MS Office because OO was slower, only about 85% compatible in terms of opening and saving files, and just generally wasn't as good. And as good as WINE is, running the MS product on Linux is not always easy or fast.

When I upgraded Ubuntu to natty LibreOffice came with it. I can honestly say that I haven't opened up Excel or Word for weeks. LO opens all of my existing files, with formatting unchanged, and works flawlessly. Plus it has that glorious one button PDF export, which in the past was so good that I would write in Word, save, and then open in OO just to use it.

For most people who use a lot of Word or Excel, but not the more exotic functions, I'd say try LibreOffice. It's fast, and does great job. It's what OO always tried to be, but failed.

Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

Re:All That I use

[Kozz]

As for PDF generation, I've gotta tell you that I still use PDFCreator. Yeah, OOo / LO has that button, but I've found that PDFCreator makes them a bit slimmer in terms of file size. Install it now from sf.net and you won't find yourself changing from MS to LO just for getting a snazzy PDF.

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to say "Get off my lawn" old timer.

Re:All That I use

[mcn]

I would say if it can "package some features" together into new options, it would be better. Eg, "top/bottom/left/right margins" into "narrow", "wide", "book"..., and double-clicking the top/bottom margin areas open up the header and footer edit.

ps: i love reveal codes too... but sadly, wordperfect is no longer popular nowadays...

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

I know what you mean. I miss them too. However, all is not lost. I am using Libre Office 3.4.2, and it has an option to show non-printable characters. Either use the paragraph symbol on the tool bar or cick 'view' then Non-printing characters. It still needs some work. It shows items like paragraph markers and tabs, but not the codes for italics and bold. Maybe with some incentive they can finish the job.

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

In Word 2007 and Word 2010:
Shift+F1
Check "Show all Formatting Marks"

Yeah, it took Microsoft 15 years, but they got there.

Re:All That I use

[antdude]

Aren't OO and LibreOffice currently the same? I read the changelogs and didn't see much differences in terms of compatibilities. Maybe I missed them?

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus it has that glorious one button PDF export, which in the past was so good that I would write in Word, save, and then open in OO just to use it.

Word 2007/2010: File/Office-Button->Save As, select "PDF (*.pdf)" as the file type and save.

Re:All That I use

[bemymonkey]

"Plus it has that glorious one button PDF export, which in the past was so good that I would write in Word, save, and then open in OO just to use it."

Wouldn't "Save As" directly from Word have been easier? Just select PDF as the filetype and you're good to go...

I'm still trying to get LibreOffice to scroll properly with Thinkpads... no scrolling => tedious navigation => me pulling my hair out.

Office 2010 on the other hand, while expensive, works quite well and provides a lot of functions that just don't exist in open source alternatives (OneNote for instance)...

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows... IMO it's just not Ready For the Desktop until PDF printing works out of the box.

Maybe next year is the year of Windows on the Desktop!

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu used go-openoffice, which was the predecessor to libreoffice, right? So, AFAIK, it was mostly a name change.... wait wait wait, forget it, I'm not going to ruin your moment

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

> Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

I believe that's coming in LibreOffice 3.5 (due out in February):
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.5#Writer

Re:All That I use

[Richard_at_work]

I stopped using PDFCreator back when their SF installer started coming with malware auto-installed, even if you said no to the browser bar.

Instead, I use the MS plugin for Office which supplies PDF as a save as option.

Re:All That I use

[Ash Vince]

When I upgraded Ubuntu to natty LibreOffice came with it. I can honestly say that I haven't opened up Excel or Word for weeks. LO opens all of my existing files, with formatting unchanged, and works flawlessly

Do you get many Office 2010 files? We often get sent them at work as most of the corporate world is on MS and it often gives me issues when opening or saving them and formatting going a bit wrong. I would like to move away from Ms Office as I am loathe to learn that crazy ribbon thing but unless I can 100% rely on Libre Office or Open Office to always create or save a file that opens perfectly in Ms Office then I just can't use it.

Disclaimer: I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

Here here.

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

webodf.org uses CSS to format ODF documents and there you can use the 'Inspect Element' button to look a the code.

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

PDFcreator is about the best free standalone we've come across, we bundle it with our product (yes, with the GPL text) and have switched to using it internally in preference to upgrading Acrobat. The UI is kind of messy, but no complaints beyond that.

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

They do different things.
PDFCreator just prints to PDF that means no links no working ToCs... that's why the files are smaller
Export to PDF on the other side make all those things posible thus making bigger files

Re:All That I use

[scottuss]

You went to all of that trouble for the PDF button? Wow, you must really value your time! This comment: Written in Notepad, pasted to Word, pdf'd, extracted using an obscure command line tool, pasted into Firefox and then deleted and manually typed into the reply box ;)

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you read? He's a linux user and no longer needs to use MS Office, thanks to Libre's speed.

Re:All That I use

[Kozz]

I stopped using PDFCreator back when their SF installer started coming with malware auto-installed, even if you said no to the browser bar.

Instead, I use the MS plugin for Office which supplies PDF as a save as option.

I completely understand, and I'm by no means a fan of apps installing browser crap of one kind or another. However, if you're careful and say "no", it won't install the browser / BHO crap. Foxit PDF I think also is another free product that comes with potential crapware, but I've just learned (and re-learned!) to be careful installing pretty much anything at all.

Re:All That I use

[Anonymous Coward]

I still miss WordPerfect 5.1 and Reveal Codes.

Amen. Moving from a typewriter to WP5.1 was two weeks of hell but, once over that hump, it was the best word-processor I've ever had. (I know, I know, I should try LaTex ...)

Re:All That I use

[Insightfill]

In Word 2007 and Word 2010: Shift+F1 Check "Show all Formatting Marks" Yeah, it took Microsoft 15 years, but they got there.

I just pulled up Word 2000: Shift+F1, big question mark comes on screen. Click on anything, even text, and get its help or formatting. Starting in Word XP (aka 2002), they popped that into the task pane to the right.

To be fair, most of the time you don't want to see the formatting as much as whack some formatting you didn't want. CTRL+Space will remove any font formatting on text, while CTRL+Q will knock any paragraph down to its style. CTRL+SHIFT+N will knock any paragraph down to Normal style, which is usually pretty generic.

You can usually get a head start on document cleanup by CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+N,CTRL+Q,CTRL+Space.

Re:All That I use

[Richard_at_work]

Actually, PDFCreator installed the shit ware even if you said no to it for a long time, during which I discovered thus and promptly stopped recommending it.

Libre Light?

[i58]

I've often wondered if anyone has ever thought about splitting libre into a personal and a professional version. Honestly, I think you could strip out 60% of it and it would serve most average users quite well for home use. There's menus I've never even looked under personally. It's got a good team, and lots of support. Not sure why they couldn't at least consider it. Sort of like what firefox was to mozilla when it first started, back when it was under a 10mb download, not the near 30mb it is today.

Re:Libre Light?

[Nutria]

Honestly, I think you could strip out 60% of it and it would serve most average users quite well for home use

That would be AbiWord.

Re:Libre Light?

[donaldm]

I've often wondered if anyone has ever thought about splitting libre into a personal and a professional version.

Why? They both cost the same (ie. free) and if you as a user don't want to use the more professional features then you don't need to use them. In addition creating so called personal and profession versions is counter productive since you will require more people to do this and like anything of this nature who is going to decide what is "personal" and what is "professional"? It would be "pass the popcorn" if you attend when the two committees meet.

The full LibreOffice is approx 101MB (part of the latest distribution media) however adding all language packs can blow this out to 600 plus MB (also on the latest distribution media). Updates, at least under Linux can vary from a few MB to approx 40MB.

Sort of like what firefox was to mozilla when it first started, back when it was under a 10mb download, not the near 30mb it is today.

For Linux the full version of Firefox is approximately 17MB and usually comes with the distribution media, with updates normally of the order of a few MB. Even under MS Windows Firefox updates are still of the order of a few MB.

Re:Libre Light?

[TeknoHog]

That would be AbiWord.

Also, in the same Gnome Office family you have Gnumeric, which fulfills most of my spreadsheeting needs. Neither of them has all of the features of the bigger cousins, for example the formatting in Word files is usually wrong. But for getting the message from a file someone sent you, they are faster than waiting for the other Offices to open.

(Frankly, I think the entire WYSIWYG Office metaphor is broken. Especially when most of the text is never actually printed, so why should it look like paper. Having open source implementations of the same idea does not make the idea any better.)

Re:Libre Light?

[Anne Thwacks]

Why? They both cost the same (ie. free) and if you as a user don't want to use the more professional features then you don't need to use them.

Because explaining to your semi-litterate cousin from the booon-docks what happened when he/she accidentally clicked on one of them thar incomprehensible options would no longer keep you from a cold beer on warm summer nights.

Re:Libre Light?

[rusl]

I use to use those but now it seems I need OO for compatability and the features are just too lacking. Also, I don't know if its just me, but those seem a lot less stable (on Ubuntu) than they use to be and OO a lot more. It use to be OO would take a full minute to load the java BS on linux but no longer.

Re:Libre Light?

[Bert64]

Another idea would be to have a configure tool like the linux kernel menuconfig... Give users the option to turn features on/off at both compiletime and at runtime (via modules), as well as the ability to auto load features as required (eg if you open a document that uses them), with the base program being very slim and loading fast...
I imagine this would be a _LOT_ of work to implement however.

Re:Libre Light?

[Nutria]

OO Writer 3.2 was slow to load, but LO 3.3.2 starts in only 4 seconds on my machine. (Ubuntu 10.10 with ppa:libreoffice/ppa.)

Libre or bust

[Anonymous Coward]

I've use OpenOffice ever since it got good enough to be used. Never missed MS Office (except MS Office 97, the best Office anyone ever made - but it was so good it just HAD to go the way of the Vista). Now on Libre Office, because that's what comes with Ubuntu (I deleted Windows - have Linux on all my computers, yay!, so even if they make Office 97 work with the latest doc formats, it's no longer an option). Also, if MS does something really dumb (which is their mantra anyway, even though they call it "innovation" in their marketspeak) and I can't open a document, I just tell Google to do it for me. Too bad I'm too busy AND stupid to contribute to Libre Office, 'cause I'm sure it could use some optimizations here and there so it rivals Office 97's efficiency and speed.

Re:Libre or bust

[Anonymous Coward]

Never missed MS Office (except MS Office 97, the best Office anyone ever made - but it was so good it just HAD to go the way of the Vista).

So I'm not the only one that likes Office 97. I still use it, it's really fast on recent hardware. Like you, if someone sends me a docx I open it in Google Docs.

It's about incompetent coders

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is relatively easy language to get into and it's the language of choice for most colleges around the world. As a result, there are a LOT of Java coders who know enough programming to create something that appears to work but don't know enough software engineering to create efficient and maintainable code. A good Java application can be very fast but there are more crappy coders and thus crappy applications than with most languages.

Also, Java has improved a lot in the recent years which means that there is a lot of legacy code in the APIs and a lot of pitfalls to be aware of. For example: Java APIs contain classes "URL" and "URI" which appear to be very similar in most ways. The newer one is OK, the older one is a horrible piece of crap (it actually uses the IP that the URL resolves to as a part of the equals-method. So comparing two instances is a slow, blocking operation that may produce unexpected results). Many applications use the old and bad APIs either because they're old themselves or because the coder just wasn't aware of this kind of problems and didn't care enough to find out why the program is slow.

The problem is very similar to that with Flash. I've had to work a lot with Flash but I've got a pretty solid software engineering background and I've noticed that one can actually create rather efficient and powerful applications with the latest version of ActionScript. Most people who use Flash tend to be visual/marketing type of people who know just enough to produce something that appears to work... and the result is heavy and buggy crap.

I used to like OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a user of OpenOffice for years (since it was StarOffice). The product was of acceptable quality and functionality .... until Oracle took over. Then LibreOffice was spin-off and what came out was actually WORST. So I stop using them.

One know issue is with both of that they suck at supporting MS office files (it did a much better job before 3.2 and actually got a lot worst on 3.3). But the worst part of all is that the latest release of BOTH distribution have a problem displaying documents (even ODF) correctly. You generate a document, save it and come back later to edit or read and the darn thing does not display the same way twice. I don't know what happened to the development team, but who ever took over (at both projects) is doing and amazing job at making the product crappy and unusable.

Runs much better, but

[tyrione]

I've still yet to use it. For Data acquisition I've got MATLAB. For numerical analysis I've got MATLAB and Octave, never mind other options. For Publishing I've got LaTeX/XeTeX. I'm glad i have it and will start leveraging Calc and more sooner rather than later, but it's not like the old days when Borland Quattro Pro for Engineers and AmiPro for word processing were fighting against Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Word 2.0, etc.

Re:Runs much better, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got all that and more, I'm on Emacs so deep I don't even know what OS this is.

Re:Runs much better, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought office through my workplace home user agree thing. $10

Needs immediate Development

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I have used it for about 2 months intensively and it has lots of issues. It just can't even save in .doc format in a correct way as files get always corrupted.
As long as there isn't a big development on going, it can't compete with MS Office in at least providng basic features.
I would love to see this stuff go further.

Re:Needs immediate Development

[jc79]

Sorry, I have used it for about 2 months intensively and it has lots of issues. It just can't even save in .doc format in a correct way as files get always corrupted.
As long as there isn't a big development on going, it can't compete with MS Office in at least providng basic features.
I would love to see this stuff go further.

Have you filed a bug? Things won't get fixed unless people know about them.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice

There is a lot of ongoing development. LibreOffice is a big project with a very active developer community.

Been using it since the fork

[volcanopele]

I've had LibreOffice installed on my laptop ever since I bought it last year. I typically use MS Office but I really didn't feel like paying for yet ANOTHER licence of it in addition to the one on my desktop. LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...

Re:Been using it since the fork

[nwf]

LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...

I wish MS Office for the Mac supported DOCX better. Granted I don't have the very latest, but it's horrendous on older versions. Of course, Mac MS Office can't really read any complex Word or Excel files from the PC properly and they are from the same company.

Re:Been using it since the fork

[hedwards]

You shouldn't be using docx, it's not a legitimate standard and it's definitely not interoperable the way that ODT files are.

Ultimately, it's ISO's fault for forgetting that it's a standards organization and that competing standards are really not as useful as ones that are compatible across software programs. Well, that and refusing to acknowledge and properly deal with the voting irregularities involved with OOXML being accepted as a standard.

Re:Been using it since the fork

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...

Blame MS, it's fundamentally their fault.

"But in the mean time I have to get work done"

I don't give a crap, you don't put the diss on people for stuff which is out of their hands. You pick sides and choose the right thing to do. If you knowingly don't, then you humbly admit your dependence, step aside, and let other people do the right thing.

(not aimed at parent/op)

Re:Been using it since the fork

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had LibreOffice installed on my laptop ever since I bought it last year.

You know, LibreOffice is free to download and install?

Re:Been using it since the fork

[ImprovOmega]

I suspect the problem isn't as much that he's using docx as it is that everyone that wants to send him files is.

Re:Been using it since the fork

[couchslug]

"I typically use MS Office but I really didn't feel like paying for yet ANOTHER licence of it"

I don't pay for software from corporations which annoy me. If I need it I download it.

There is no reward for behaving differently towards our masters, so grab what crumbs you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

Re:Been using it since the fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can't properly support the DOCX format, why would you expect anyone else to be able to?

Lacking templates

[jbov]

Disclaimer: I rarely use any office products.
I was an OO user, but switched to LibreOffice when Debian made the switch. I've been happy the few times I've used it.

Over the years, while trying to sell the idea of OO or LO to clients and friends, I've not had much success. Other than the ridiculous gripe they've had about not saving new documents as MS .doc formats by default, the major complaint has been lack of templates. A vanilla install of OO or LO doesn't have nearly the amount of templates that are bundled with MS Office. I tried pointing these users to template downloads at thedocumentfoundation.org, but there are only a handful there as well. Additionally, I just checked the LibreOffice site, and they suggest visiting opentemplate.org, which appears to be down.

As I said, I don't use any Office programs, but there is the feedback I've gotten from people I referred to OO & LO.

I've had more success with family members, but then again they are all converted to linux and never looked back.

Re:Lacking templates

[Anonymous Coward]

You can save them as .doc by default. It in Tools->Options under Load/Save->Default.

Re:Lacking templates

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off.. MS Shill

Re:Lacking templates

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many templates available for LibreOffice and you can install them by the Extension Manager. You can find many of them at the OpenOffice.org website and they work well in LibO. Besides that there is a brandnew Templates Portal for LibO. Also you can Google for OOo and LibO templates and you'll find them for sure. For instance I've installed the following using the Extension Manager:

OOOP-accessories-2.8.0.0.oxt (clipart for LibO Gallery), OOOP-templates-seperated-en-US-2.8.0.1.oxt, Vorlagen_de_opendoc.oxt, Sun Professional Template Pack English 1 and Sun Professional Template Pack English II.

Don't also forget, if you use Windows, to install the latest version of the grammar checker Language Tool (version 1.4 or higher). In the Linux-versions of LibO that's already installed, at least in my OpenSUSE box.

Hope I helped you

Re:Lacking templates

[jbov]

Thanks a million. Now I'm better prepared to help others make the switch to LibreOffice. Unfortunately I have no mod points to give you.

Re:Lacking templates

[jbov]

Thank you. I guess I should create a list of templates to install by default on other people's computers. The Professional Template Pack English II looks very promising.

The LanguageTool extension is not provided with the with the Debian packages. Actually, LanguageTool is not yet in the Debian repository. There has been a bug report filed, since LibreOffice ships with LanguageTool by default. So, it should probably ship with the Debian package as well. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=403619

Any insight on whether LibreOffice and OpenOffice extensions will remain interchangeable as the two projects migrate away from each other?

Lack of pivot chart support

[crazybilly]

Until LibreOffice develops strong pivot chart support in their spreadsheet product and better mail merge support in their word processor, it's still only an ugly toy, not a true replacement for what you'd really use a spreadsheet for.

LibreOffice is to MS Office as GIMP is to Photoshop. Which is to say, "a great replacement for the casual user, but 100% inadequate in vital ways to someone who uses the software to get work done.

Which is a dang shame because I'd love to dump anything with M$'s or Adobe's name on it.

Re:Lack of pivot chart support

[ledow]

Although I wouldn't ever dismiss such things as "never going to happen", the point is that 99% of people who have Office installed (or, worse, go out and buy it separately) have every need they'll ever have for a office suite catered for by LibreOffice.

Personally, it's more than good enough for anything I ever used Office for and when I take into account the cost, I'm more than happy to fiddle a little more with a free product than pay to save a tiny bit of rare inconvenience. To be honest, LibreOffice actually gets more done for me - for a start, any file that MSOffice struggles to open can usually be thrown into LibreOffice and *something* got out of it without having to faff with import filters.

Not everything has to be about making a program that every big business will immediately switch to. That's the "Linux desktop" argument that's been in play for the last decade and is a really bad way to think about things - there are more legitimate privately-held copies of Windows/Office out there than there are business ones.

The point is that LibreOffice is "good enough" for "enough" users that they'll never need to buy or touch MS Office if they don't want to - that alone makes it worth developing for and supporting. I have no interest in them adding big-business-only features that I'll never use, I'd much rather they spent my donations on getting things that everybody will use working. The businesses can bloody look after themselves if they want to and need a critical feature - either by sponsoring the feature or by throwing their own developers on it. The little guys can't do that, and the people at home certainly can't.

I'm an IT Manager for a private school that uses MS software on all its desktops (educational and administrative). I do *not* have MS Office installed on my work laptop (the only machine I personally use apart from servers), I have LibreOffice. Not only have I never received a file that I couldn't open, or one that had broken formulae and couldn't be used, but I use LibreOffice to open ancient/weird/newer formats of office documents from parents etc. in order to convert them to something the teachers/office staff can actually open. And every letter / results spreadsheet that passes through the office ends up as a PDF on our website - a PDF created by LibreOffice's export feature.

Hell, we run our sportsday via complex Excel spreadsheets, not to mention test-result-analysis, everyday office stuff, mailmerge, etc. I'm not saying LibreOffice would do *everything* we could potentially throw at it, but the point is that as someone managing IT for an MS Office environment, I've never needed anything that LibreOffice is missing.

That means, for the vast, vast majority of Office users, there's no reason they couldn't use it too.

This is true of a lot of programs that people use everyday. Most of our software is free or open-source because, for example, VLC does a million times better job of JUST PLAYING THE DAMN DVD than anything that was bundled with the computer ever will (and is consistent, whereas there are half-a-dozen pieces of "bundled" DVD player software that come through my office on new laptops - they all go into the "never install, but keep around" drawer).

That said, I also use a bucketful of Open Source programs to do lots of things that I used to have to buy proprietary applications for (Scribus, InkScape, Openfire - a Jabber server - hell even our VPN is OpenVPN) and have never touched GIMP because it's completely inadequate (though the Gimp-Photoshop-lookalike was infinitely more usable). I'm not suggesting any of them would be useful to someone on the cutting-edge of what the proprietary equivalent can do, but for the vast majority of users, such programs do everything they need and cost infinitely less.

Even "free" (but not open-source) software can make amazing savings on the average desktop (business or personal). Our standard install image here has, at a minimum:

Audacity
CDBurner XP Pro
FileZilla
Firefox

Re:Lack of pivot chart support

[crazybilly]

I can't disagree with your overall point--in fact, I think you sum it up nicely with:

There's nothing there of "commercial quality", by your standards, but it's standard kit that would keep millions of people happy on their personal machines and millions of small businesses running just fine.

In fact, I don't know that I've ever made a pivot chart at home, and didn't even know what they were still I started working in business (ugh).

In the business world, though, I've needed a lot of the obscure bells and whistles that MS Office has, the same way a professional graphic designer couldn't get by with GIMP without a lot of heartache.

The problem I see is that people tout programs like LibreOffice and GIMP as complete replacements for the outlandishly expensive proprietary versions without understanding that, while more than adequate for the average user, power users regularly find them inadequate, which in turn making us in the FLOSS community look ridiculous, like we don't understand our audience.

Re:Lack of pivot chart support

[Bert64]

Average users outnumber power users pretty massively, and those average users could therefore save HUGE amounts of money by using the free alternatives.

Power users are a small niche, it makes no sense for millions of people to spend large sums of money for features that only a small niche of users require... Or would you advocate that everyone drive F1 cars because a small handful of race drivers can benefit from them?

Lacking export/export of Excel formulas.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a math teacher and I use Libreoffice to write assignments for my students. Most of my colleagues use Word, and some of them have assembled lots of education material over the years. These files are full of formulas, so I cannot import them in to Libreoffice. I hope that some of the new Libreoffice programmers decide to work on export and import of formulas i LIbreoffice. (doc would be most useful, but docx wouyld also be nice).

Re:Lacking export/export of Excel formulas.

[Bert64]

Perhaps Latex would be a far better choice if your dealing with a lot of mathematical formulae...

Stripping it Down

[csrster]

I find that for 95% of my document needs Google Docs has everything I need (and mysteriously it seems to come pre-installed on every computer I use). The other 5% I write in Google Docs anyway and get somebody else to do the fancy formatting afterwards.

LibreOffice on OS X Lion

[lloy0076]

LibreOffice works well enough on OS X Lion as does OpenOffice.org. However, neither of them are a native OS X application with the look and feel and this is a reasonable deal breaker for me. Plus it's not as fast as MS Office running under VMWare Fusion!

DSL

Re:LibreOffice on OS X Lion

[vgerclover]

LibreOffice works well enough on OS X Lion as does OpenOffice.org. However, neither of them are a native OS X application with the look and feel and this is a reasonable deal breaker for me. Plus it's not as fast as MS Office running under VMWare Fusion!

DSL

So, it works ok, but it doesn't look right on OS X, so your solution is running Windows' MS Office? Just trying to follow the logic here.

Re:LibreOffice on OS X Lion

[lloy0076]

OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice look about as non-native on Windows too.

Unfortunately when I need an office application the native formats most send to me or want are some version of MS Word. Consequently, to entice me away from Word itself would take some doing and if the application doesn't comply to OS X's look and feel I will turf it.

When I use MS Word heavily I am in full screen Windows 7. The only things that show I'm on an Apple are the Apple logos, the physical format and the keyboard. I find the MS user interface more frustrating than OS X but I can use it and these days it's consistently mediocre.

But I refuse to use a crap interface on OS X unless there is a compelling reason to do so, e.g. the SIP software I use, its interface is CRAP but it's the only one that will work for the most part.

DSL

It just feels good !!

[stooo]

Of course, it takes some seconds to load, but LO then is fast and snappy (much faster with big docs than MS Office !!)

For the ribbon, I hate it. On computers at work, i either install libre office, when the company IT allows, or I use this : http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
which is really great for having back my menus in MS office 2007/2010 !!

For me, the ribbon is inconsistent and encombering the screen. I will not spend a 1 month learning curve, just because MS wants me to get locked in to a crappy UI. Many people are like that.

Libreoffice is really great. Calc and writer are surpassing MSOffice 2010.

Interesting

[Murdoch5]

I love libre office, it's the only office suite I use. What doesn't make any sense to me is that schools and work places don't switch over. Libre office can do every major action MS Office can do and it's free. This is another clear case where the open source world has produced far better software then the closest source world, so far we have Linux as the best all around OS and now Libre Office as the best Office Suite.

Re:Interesting

[Bert64]

The problem is with the teaching, people are taught very poorly... They are not taught general concepts, they are taught specific of particular applications so if they were to learn Libreoffice people would complain that it's not what working environments are using.

Instead they should be taught the general concepts of how such applications work, and how to apply those concepts to a range of different applications which perform the same basic tasks... After all, what workplaces are using now isn't necessarily what they will be using when these kids finish school (we were taught wordperfect for dos in school, i haven't seen any company using it since leaving school).

Re:Interesting

[causality]

The problem is with the teaching, people are taught very poorly... They are not taught general concepts, they are taught specific of particular applications so if they were to learn Libreoffice people would complain that it's not what working environments are using.

You see half of the problem. That much I can say with certainty. But do you see why it is not going to be solved, why those who make the decisions and control the curriculum, who could solve it in short order, will never voluntarily do so?

Can you take the next step and see the other half? It's simple: it is 100% deliberate. The "educators" have thoroughly explored psychology and development and the learning process. They cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for why the average American is frankly so damned stupid, docile, and undiscerning. For example, they know that students taught to read via phonics greatly outperform those taught with the "whole word" methods. Those taught with phonics are often several grade levels ahead of their peers. Yet which method do they push? Whole-word. Because then you have to be taught and cannot reason it out on your own.

The US school system was built on Prussian-style schooling. The entire purpose of it is to produce (like a factory) citizens who are just smart enough to perform useful, non-trivial work yet dumb enough not to look too deeply into things, not to enjoy learning, not to have natural curiosity, not to discover things on their own because they were taught to depend on someone else to hand knowledge to them. Definitely, above all else, they are not to have the capability of the kind of critical and abstract principle-based conceptual thought (what one may call a classical philosopher) that would make them tough-minded, independent, and able to individually question the social order in which they are asked to participate.

The wealthy businessmen who established the American school system we know today were, in the beginning, extremely open and up-front about their intentions. They quite plainly stated that it was about control. They admired the Hindus, the way the tiny minority of Brahmins could maintain control over all the lower castes, the way this was done through forced "education" and learned subservience. What they most strongly feared, right at the height of the Industrial Revolution, was "overproduction" - the idea that the independent, entrepreneurial, individual spirit that defined America had to be destroyed or else the factories with the massive investments put into them would have to compete with many different small businesses. This was a time when most men had a trade and a business and were their own boss or aspiring to be. It is not compatible with the concentration of wealth and top-down administration of large corporations.

The very finest reference available for this subject is John Taylor Gatto. To stand up and speak out as he has done requires some actual guts (notice how rare that is these days?). He also has an entire book on the subject available online for free.

Time to buy another pair of shoes...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is really hard to get enterprise folks jazzed up about OO or LibreOffice when support for DOCX fidelity is lacking. Still begs the question, why move to/blend in OO/LibreOffice installations, when there is a Enterprise Agreement covering Office2010 and Office365. Lord though, I do wish we could do better, and yes...I too miss reveal codes. I still fire Borland Quattro Pro, AmiPro, and WordPerfect 9 from time to time to remind me what is lacking. On the other hand, if Star Office had not been dumped out onto the scene we would not be having these conversations.

Libre feels good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it feel like wearing stretchy pants... in your room..., for fun?

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its going to become better

[nickferber]

at least calc will. libreoffice calc cell datastructures are not suitable to offloading chunks of operations. once a rewrite is achieved (which is being thought about, should be worked upon soon), you could offload actions to gpu making things a lot faster. About the ui though, I am not happy with the current state of things, since I hate menus. It creates the illusion of organization, even though a single menu has more than 15 items in it. That is crappy design, it is familiar, but crappy nevertheless. I have been a linux user since a long time, but I do not hate everything Microsoft for the heck of it. I think ribbon ui, is a decent (eats screen estate.. bad) solution to organizational problem. Perhaps a Kate-sque approach would be good.

AmiPro 3.1!

[rusl]

I still miss it! The format catagories actually made sense and you could quickly switch with the function keys. No other word processor has ever been as easy to use as what I had in 1993 (And while I'm at it I miss Eudora 5)

I've been using Openoffice a lot lately. Gnumeric and Abiword just break too many things. Also the slowness of F***ing java is starting to be less relevent, even though I still wish they used python or something less likely to eat my memory and more open.

I want to switch to Libreoffice but reading up on it it seems there are technical hurdles which I just don't have time for cause I use OO for work. Also I like the acronym OO better than LO. Really I never was a hug fan of Sun though I'm told they were better than Oracle is. So I didn't like the owner since it was Sun (also for virtualbox) but I stuck with it due to the lack of alternative.

I'm really glad there is a fork though. In the long term I definately would want to switch. I'll probably do it when I upgrade Ubuntu and I know its already mature and integrated because I just don't have time right now to hack anything.

Re:AmiPro 3.1!

[rduke15]

I also still miss Ami Pro every time I need to write anything in a word processor. Nothing can compare to the simple and efficient way it let you use and manage.

For those who don't know what was so special:

Formatting was applied through styles, which lived in style sheets.
Styles were assigned to Function keys. You could also access more styles through the menus, but the point was that you assigned your 10 most needed styles to 10 F-keys, so you could just keep typing structured text (with titles, quotes, bullets, whatever) without ever needing to get distracted by a mouse and hunting stuff through menus.

If only there was an HTML editor working like Ami Pro...

A not too bad word processor in these sad times without Ami Pro is Softmaker's TextMaker. However, it uses a proprietary format for documents and templates, the Linux version feels awkward, and there is no Mac version. But for Windows users, it may be a good alternative to Word or it's bloated clones OO/LO.