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Intel Joins LibreOffice
New submitter dgharmon writes "The month of February is a month to remember for the LibreOffice project. They formally incorporated the foundation in Berlin, released 3.5 with major changes and now Intel is joining the foundation as a member. Intel will also make available the LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE in Intel AppUp center. Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices."
Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux, to spread the wealth of FOSS software, to have more and more people have real choices...yes? Am I right?
As a Linux user speaking for nobody else, no, I don't really care.
As for EG, I've never used it, but I do study in a place where all machines dual-boot Windows and Linux, and despite the Linux distro booting much faster and actually having more applications (which users can't run on Windows, since it's pretty locked down), I've never seen anyone choose Linux unless by mistake, and even those proceeded to reboot the machine.
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Actually, among my other hats I'm a trained Technical Writer (in the superb Information Mapping methodology). I actually prefer LibreOffice to MS Word for just getting things done. LibreOffice doesn't has all the bells and whistles that MS Office does, and has the occasional glitch but MS Office is just painful to use. It's slow, it crashes a lot, I have to wrestle with it to get what I want done. I'm afraid I can't agree with your assessment. MS Office is worse than LibreOffice, at least for professional work. At the high end I wouldn't even use MS Office, Acrobat is much better, and beyond that is TeX/LaTeX (for pro-level typesetting). MS Word really is for n00bs that don't know much better and whinge if the interface doesn't look exactly like the version of MS Word they got their training on.
Oh, and complaining that a MS Word template doesn't work perfectly in LibreOffice is fairly lame. If you want to use Word templates you should pay for Word. How about you make a template for LibreOffice instead? - if you actually have the skill to do such a thing.
At least LibreOffice can display Word files, even a little junkily. Most versions of Word do an even worse job with Word files from different Word versions, and besides Word being so retarded it can barely deal with its own format it certainly can't deal with the formats of any other product (the bigger the organisation is, the more likely it is that they have critical systems that aren't Windows in addition to Windows desktops - but Microsoft want to pretend that this is not reality for the sake of their own business interests). If the person that made the company Word templates had instead made Open Document Format templates then things would have worked pretty sweetly for you, not matter whether you had used LibreOffice, OpenOffice or one of the other alternatives that use the (true) ISO standard format. It's just you are so inculcated with the Microsoft monoculture (you're certainly not alone in this) you blame LibreOffice for getting Microsoft's proprietary formats wrong (and Microsoft's ISO standardisation was a blatantly corrupt process and produced a 'standard' that is woefully underspecified). Please assign the blame where it is due, on Microsoft's proprietary doorstep.