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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.'"
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.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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.
Three Squirrels
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.
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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.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.