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."

Comments

windows only app up

[vlm]

Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices.

Minor correction; its a windows only app store. Does not perform the miracle of running the same executable on mac osx, all linux distros, and windows. Just windows thats all.

libreoffice is available for all those platforms, just not available on the windows only appup

Re:windows only app up

[HForN]

Also, even Vista isn't officially supported.
http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-4664#Q_Why_is_Microsoft_Windows_Vista_not_supported_with_Intel_AppUpSM_center/

Re:windows only app up

[rubycodez]

I don't know anyone that runs that shit, my windows loving and windows certified engineer friends couldn't get off that crap to win 7 fast enough. I have banking clients that standardized on vista long-term as part of their strategic plan, and made the unprecedented step of taking the effort to recertify all the apps for win 7, the vista suckage was so very hard and deep

Re:windows only app up

[hairyfeet]

It is also included with AMD netbooks so its not Intel only either as it came with my EEE 1215B. its not bad but I have a question: 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?

Then why in the hell are you not getting behind ExpressGate/Splashtop? Its fucking brilliant! The most innovative thing I've seen come from FOSS and you are just ignoring it? WTF? Why aren't you sending emails and letters and demanding all OEMs include this wonderful thing? For those that haven't tried it here is how it works: you have two buttons, one starts regular Windows, the other ExpressGate which we'll call EG. Now you push the Windows button you are looking at a bare minimum 45 seconds and that is if you used hibernate, with EG? 6 seconds cold boot. Now lets talk battery life, Win 7 HP X64 gets right at 6 hours on my 6 cell, if I use Brazos tweaker to lower the voltage I can squeeze it to 6:45, now how does that compare to EG? Over 7 hours with no tweaking. Now lets talk intuitive, if you know Windows you know Win 7, the search box is a big help but otherwise it hasn't really changed much. EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games, video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system. hell my mother could work this thing. it can also access media on your hard drive if you wish so you can still have all those tunes and videos you may have on your Windows partition in EG but again with better battery life as it seems to load as much as it can in memory and then shut down the HDD, this of course is smart as RAM takes the same power empty or full.

So here is your shot community, quit trying to rip off Windows (or more often the Macintosh) and simply route AROUND Windows instead. This is a way that every OEM could supply a FOSS OS to the masses WITHOUT the hassles of dual booting WITHOUT any "update foo broke my drivers" crap, hell you don't even really need CLI at all unless you want to script something. all you need to do is port plenty of apps to run with the EG/ST UI and pressure OEMs which frankly shouldn't be a hard sell as its a pretty simple setup, a little ROM, a little HDD space for extra apps, and a button. That's it! It probably costs less than 50c to add that feature to the bulletpoints on a unit. So C'mon Linux community, you finally have a winner if you would just step up. it has everything users want, its fast, its intuitive, it gets great battery life, its easy.

Re:windows only app up

[icebraining]

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.

Re:windows only app up

[fred911]

Intel AppUp center is an ...

A bloated front end for ftp://intel.com/pub/win .

Re:windows only app up

[eldorel]

Why is the linux community ignoring Expressgate?

It can be difficult to update (bios/firware update?)
It can't be used on different systems. (I want my laptop and desktop and netbook to at least be similar systems.)
It is "customized" by the oem. (yay, another sybian/andriod style compatibility/UI nightmare)
It can't be easily backed up by an end user.
It is yet another layer of crap to break.
It has a tiny list of available software that has to be installed via an "app store".
It's virtually impossible to for an end user to know exactly what it is running behind the UI.

Additionally, On the laptops I've seen it on, it doesn't actually access 90% of the hardware (Usb-wifi/3d graphics/printer/scanner ?), and if I remember correctly is actually a locked efi partition with hooks directly into the bios.

That's why I'm ignoring it personally.

Now, if they can get it to be a fully featured os frontend for linux without the hardware dependent crap, maybe it could gain traction as a window manager instead of being just another piece of crappy bloatware that I uninstall.

There are two simple reasons that expressgate appears to work so well.
1) it only uses the hardware that is part of the motherboard. (see apple for how this works)
2) It's limited to only 3 or 4 activities and a few simple games.

Anyone (and everyone) can build a locked down device that plays music, surfs the web, and can play a few games on very specific hardware. (look at every handheld console in the last 4 years along with the entire smartphone/tablet market).

The entire point of a generic PC operating system is flexibility.
The single common thread with almost every successful linux distribution is the idea that the USER SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE.
Almost every single linux user I know of lists "the freedom to change things to work the way I like" as a primary motivation for switching.
"I can continue to use my $(unusual hardware peripheral)" is also right up there in the top 10 reasons.

If you don't need the ability to adapt to new requirements or to add completely new software/hardware then why are you buying a PC?
Go get a tablet, an hdmi monitor, and a bluetooth keyboard, just like my grandmother.

Re:windows only app up

[TheRealMindChild]

How many people go out of their way to buy a custom motherboard vs. some OEM prefab machine? Of those, how many are going to follow such a niche as Splashtop (let alone understand it)? Where exactly is the motivation (financial or otherwise)?

Re:windows only app up

[symbolset]

Keep thinking that Billy. You are #winning. You have Adonis DNA. Don't ever change.

and only had 1 piece of malware in a year.

Only one? A high achievement that. I congratulate you on your skill and good fortune. You must be especially prudent about clicking on unfamiliar links and opening emails from strangers.

Re:windows only app up

[MrEricSir]

ow you push the Windows button you are looking at a bare minimum 45 seconds and that is if you used hibernate, with EG? 6 seconds cold boot. Now lets talk battery life, Win 7 HP X64 gets right at 6 hours on my 6 cell, if I use Brazos tweaker to lower the voltage I can squeeze it to 6:45, now how does that compare to EG? Over 7 hours with no tweaking. Now lets talk intuitive, if you know Windows you know Win 7, the search box is a big help but otherwise it hasn't really changed much. EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games, video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system.

So the benefits of ExpressGate are exactly the same as using a tablet? Because Linux already has a decent-sized market share of that market.

Re:windows only app up

[Maow]

I don't know anyone that runs that shit, my windows loving and windows certified engineer friends couldn't get off that crap to win 7 fast enough. I have banking clients that standardized on vista long-term as part of their strategic plan, and made the unprecedented step of taking the effort to recertify all the apps for win 7, the vista suckage was so very hard and deep

My then-new PC came with Vista and yes, the suckage was intense. But SP1 fixed all that, made it workable.

I still switched to Linux at that time, haven't gone back. Have played with Win7 in a VirtualBox and it feels just like Vista, maybe SP2.

So what is it that makes 7 superior to Vista? The joke at the time was 7 was just a new service pack on Vista, and that's very likely true considering how long it took for Vista to be prepared for general release.

Re:windows only app up

[RubberMallet]

Clearly you are clueless... it was actually funny to read your trolling comment.. I actually laughed out loud at your uninformed rant.

I wonder how many years ago it was that you actually used Linux.

A few minor points... Linux is NOT Gnome shell... MP3 support is available from install, ie without searching for anything... standard webcams that use UVC (as in all current consumer grade webscams) work without the user needing to do anything other than plug it in... who installs Skype from a Windows CDROM? Seriously? Are you really that stupid?

I think at this point I'll stop. Each and every one of your points seem to come from a big pile of FUD that you're wallowing in. Nothing you stated about Linux was true... it's not a perfect OS, but... you are seriously misinformed about it.

Re:windows only app up

[gmhowell]

Hmm, a sybian android? Rule 34 of this, plz.

Re:windows only app up

[Hognoxious]

Hi, bonch.

Re:windows only app up

[gtall]

Suppose you are an OEM. People buy your box because it runs winders. Offering Expressgate, et.al. increases the number of things that can go wrong, and also need to be supported. For what precisely? The 'precisely' bit is important, without an accurate gauge of what it will do for the OEM's bottom line, they won't touch it.

Re:windows only app up

[Billly Gates]

100% true according to grandma and Joe Six Pack. If you read my whole comment you would see where I mention WMs and hunting the internet for special repositories for mp3 codecs doesnt make sense in 2012.

Yes the average housewife will put in her logitech cd to install skype and then bash linux for not working. The average user does not know what a kernel is and thinks the gui is the os. When they see gdm crash due to an update they will curse linux. Windows updates wont break shit.

I stand by my point that linux is not a desktop os. Windows won

Re:windows only app up

[Billly Gates]

... and keep thinking you are not delusional. I am sure your users would think you are #1 winner if you dared installed Ubuntu on their PCs.

I can tell you are not an IT professional who does support. If you were, you would know that the number one cause of infections are drive by downloads and exploits from holes in flash, java, and browsers. I disable Java on the internet but I use flash as part of my web development tools and a rogue ad got through from a site that needed flash to function.

I am guessing you are an elitest who used WindowsME and IE 5.5 back in the days and remember the 64,000 bugs of Windows 17 years ago and are frozen in time from your hatred. Or you are a college student with no real world experience where your professor is from the the typical stereotype who has never worked in business or did back in the 20th century and spews all this anti MS BS etc.

Linux lacks stable abis so a simple apt-get update can hose your system if you update your video card drivers. Is that acceptable for a Joe Six Pack? I have seen horrible bugs and just getting Ubuntu to work on my old laptop is a challange. With Windows it just works. MY desktop works better with Linux but the software packages are flaky. Java and X still do not render fonts properly as they claim they disabled font hinting due to patents from Apple or some BS.

If you worked in a PC shop and installed Ubuntu your angry users will file complaints through the roof! Linux is not a desktop OS and you had your chance. Windows 7 is perfectly stable relatively bug free and well tested. There is no reason to change and it is bizaare? You do not buy a TV just to replace the backlit light or a coffee Maker just to replace the heating element? Same with a PC. Just turn it on and go work. It is part of the whole platform and it makes no sense to change it unless you are special user like I mentioned in my other post. Linux distro include buggy bleeding edge packages, it does not look nor function like MacOSX or Windows, its gui is ugly (normal users do not know about WMs), and Windows already comes with their computers.

I am disappointed in slashdot and hoped there would be some intelligent people with lives and understand real world use. I have been proven wrong and it looks like arstechnica is the last place left.

Re:windows only app up

[jonadab]

> Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux

Sure. I mean, not EVERYONE (replacing one monopoly with another is seldom a significant long-term improvement), but I definitely want *some* people to use it.

> Then why in the hell are you not getting behind ExpressGate/Splashtop?

Three reasons. 1. This is the first I've ever heard of either ExpressGate or Splashtop. 2. After bouncing around from distro to distro for a good while (including FreeBSD for a couple of years), I've now kind of settled down with Debian. I gave it a try again when Sarge came out, and it's been meeting my needs ever since. I don't have a reason to switch at this time. 3. Your description of the technology you are promoting doesn't make me want it. Quite the reverse.

Like most serious computer users, I routinely go months and months between reboots, so a fast boot option just isn't a very compelling feature. I mean, sure, if it doesn't have any negative consequences, I wouldn't *mind* having fast boot, but on the priority scale I'd rank it somewhere between a 3% performance improvement in Postgres and having relatime turned on by default. It's not something that's going to have me chomping at the bit to jump distros.

Battery life would only be meaningful if I were willing to suffer the agony of using a laptop, with its steaming heap of non-standard proprietary components and its one tiny little poor-quality screen and horrible little non-standard cramped non-tactile-feedback keyboard and deplorable performance characteristics and inadequate cooling and a case that's absolutely impossible to work in if you should ever happen to want to do any upgrades or repairs. I would rather wear naugahyde pants and cast iron socks than have to work with a laptop on a regular basis.

And then there's this:
> EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games,
> video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system.

I don't know how else to say it: this does not sound like a description of a system that would interest me.

Re:windows only app up

[twocows]

I've found completely the opposite. My laptop worked great with Vista SP2. Moving to 7 SP1 caused me nothing but headaches; it was slower, I started having bluescreens (infrequently), and the interface was a PITA until I finally got around to reverting it to the old style, and even then WLM had to be run in compatibility mode or it would constantly take up a giant part of my taskbar. Vista SP2 is actually really nice by comparison.

Re:windows only app up

[e70838]

Linux is my desktop OS since two years. I have migrated mostly because my hardware was not supported by vista 64 (old printer and old scanner).
I have no software problem: open office, eclipse and google chrome are the same as on windows, wine works perfectly for the couple of remaining applications where I am too lazy to learn the Linux equivalent.
I just wish everybody migrate to Linux so that I can buy new hardware without worrying about linux support.

Re:windows only app up

[e70838]

Never had a crash due to an update on Ubuntu. Fiddling always with the system is a bad habit coming from windows. You do not need that on Linux
On linux, the installation is not always easy, but after that, you can forget about system and just use the applications.
System healing is a windows problem where the OS degrades with time. On Linux, performance do not degrade, it still work like the first day.

Re:windows only app up

[hairyfeet]

You asked the parent which is me so I'll answer...Linux? Pointless because as you so rightly pointed out its the kiss of death at retail because without an ABI I have yet to see an in place upgrade not shit on drivers, be it LTS to LTS or regular to regular, now EG/ST? Totally different story as literally I can check my emails and fire off a reply before Win 7 has even loaded the WinFlag and that is coming out of hibernate, I can check my email,load up my tunes, and begin checking out books in the appstore before Win 7 starts from cold boot. Its about SPEED and ease of use. no CLI, no "update foo broke my drivers" bullshit, no muss, no fuss, its all intuitive, its all simple, its all clicky clicky easy. Oh and it does have a Google docs style app that makes opening and editing Word docs simple and again MUCH faster than Windows.

In the end what this does is give netbooks and laptops (and desktops BTW, there are a few models that come with it) the ability to have cell phone speeds without having to buy crazy expensive and failure high SSDs and THAT is a selling point. You'd be surprised how many EEE netbooks i've sold simply by showing people how quickly I can be working on the web from cold start, i can literally check my email in under 14 seconds from cold start. This adds a hell of a lot of value to my netbook because anywhere at anytime I can just pop the lid and i'm connected BAM! And its so intuitive I had my mom using it in under 30 seconds, all i needed to show her was "where is the mouse?"...its called a trackpad ma. Once she knew how to move the mouse that was it, she was checking out ebooks and looking on amazon for her favorite authors as it has built in kindle support.

You should give a EEE with EG a try Billy, as a retailer I know of every complaint you've mentioned and wouldn't sell Linux on even these offlease machines simply because of the high driver failure rates but EG? its an easy sale as you lose nothing while gaining speed.

Who's Paying the LibreOffice Devs?

[Eponymous Coward]

Aren't most of the paid OpenOffice developers Oracle employees? I'm talking about the Star Office guys. Does LibreOffice have the same development manpower behind it?

Re:Who's Paying the LibreOffice Devs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Document Foundation has a really nice graphics explaining who does which work:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/02/fosdem-preview/
Looks like other companies plus volunteers are adding much more to LibreOffice now than Oracle contributed to OpenOffice.

Re:Who's Paying the LibreOffice Devs?

[Anonymous Coward]

SUN was the biggest contributor, but Oracle is doing jack all. Most of the community that were around in the Sun days are now on LibreOffice.

Re:Who's Paying the LibreOffice Devs?

[RubberMallet]

Not anymore. You REALLY are behind the times. Oracle dropped OpenOffice.org and StarOffice in the middle of April 2011. They put the entire staff of the Hamburg Germany office (where 99% of the paid OOo developers worked) on paid leave until they sorted out the layoffs. The layoffs officially started around September 2011.

During that same period, Oracle worked with the Apache Foundation to turn over the stewardship of OOo to Apache.... this has... not gone so well... mainly because almost all of the developers, previously paid and otherwise left to go work on LibreOffice. OOo development has stalled and stagnated, while LibreOffice development is going on at a rate that is far above what it saw when Sun was controlling things.

As of now, there are zero paid OOo developers in the same sense as there were during the period when Sun Microsystems was around. There are a few people (like IBM employees) who are paid to work on OOo, but it's very minimal compared to how it was between 2000 and 2010.

Re:Who's Paying the LibreOffice Devs?

[TheRaven64]

Oracle's mismanagement seems to have been good for a few projects. Both Solaris^WIllumos and Open^WLibreOffice have benefitted from the fact that there were briefly a lot of unemployed developers with experience with the codebase. Other companies snapped them up pretty quickly, and now neither project is controlled by a single organisation, making it easier to encourage new developers. When Sun employed 90% of the people with Solaris kernel experience, no one wanted to be a junior partner. When 70% of them quit in protest over Oracle's open source strategy, it became a lot more interesting because now they're scattered over half a dozen companies with no single corporation dictating strategy.

OpenOffice once again?

[Sussurros]

Given how IBM gave OpenOffice to Apache for its own business purposes I find that I more than a little uncomfortable about this. After all, LibreOffice was forned as a direct result of IBM's handling of OpenOffice.

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Samantha Wright]

s/IBM/Oracle/g;

(Was that a bad troll, comparison, or brain failure?)

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Sussurros]

Brain Failure - pure and simple brain failure. I even did a search to make sure I ahd my facts right...,

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly the Apache Office project is basically dead. Certainly when compared to LibreOffice:
http://www.italovignoli.org/2012/02/no-comment/
It is nice that the code was rescued from the claws of Oracle, but there is no development of the old code base anymore.
The whole community shifted to the Document Foundation and is helping LibreOffice get better and better.
Which is probably for the better, it would be nasty if there would be dueling groups around the same code base.

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Kjella]

On LibreOffice's development stats there's a fair chunk that says Oracle (OOo code) - I'd say around 15%, so it would seem they pull in most of those improvements anyway if it's possible. So it seems there will be very little reason to run the Apache version, unless LibreOffice start breaking more than they fix...

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Samantha Wright]

You should get a refund. Whatever amount you paid to learn how to troll, it was too much.

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[stephanruby]

Did you mean Oracle instead of IBM?

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Samantha Wright]

I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling this. You're too intelligent, and not desperate enough. Can you just start over?

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[gmhowell]

You should get a refund. Whatever amount you paid to learn how to troll, it was too much.

Relax, it's the closest this person has come to engaging a female (as long as rule 1 is not a lie) in who knows how long.

Re:OpenOffice once again?

[Sussurros]

The AC post wasn't from me and, just for the record, I'm fairly sure that Victoria University doesn't do refunds, LOL. I was really relieved when I saw that I'd made a mistake and that it was Intel and not IBM (nor Oracle FWIW). Intel's participation can only be good. I use LibreOffice every day for major documents and minor spreadsheets so its survival is a matter of some importance to me.

LibreOffice!

[Anonymous Coward]

FTW!

(fuck Oracle)

Re:LibreOffice!

[diego.viola]

+1

Re:LibreOffice!

[brian.wietse]

+1000

Sorry, saw Intel read IBM

[Sussurros]

Sorry, saw Intel read IBM, oops.....

It's a start

[bbbaldie]

Business has somehow gotten the whacked idea that it can't survive without paying hundreds of dollars per seat for an app that creates and edits office documents. Thanks, Intel, for helping to educate them that that's balderdash.

Re:It's a start

[larry bagina]

Intel doesn't want you to spend hundreds of dollars on office software, they want you to spend hundreds of dollars on new processors because your FREE software is slow as fuck and requires new hardware.

Re:It's a start

[bbbaldie]

Are you saying Libre Office is slower than the Microsoft version?

Re:It's a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is. It absolutely is slower. Libre Office does what most individuals need. Although, to be fair, Google Docs probably does what most individuals need anyway. But for businesses, MS Office makes a heck of a lot of sense still. Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel run most large companies.

Re:It's a start

[westlake]

Business has somehow gotten the whacked idea that it can't survive without paying hundreds of dollars per seat for an app that creates and edits office documents.

The geek sees the stand-alone office suite.

What he does not see is that MS Office is sold as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size.

Re:It's a start

[bbbaldie]

I haven't seen that, myself. No substitute for Access, unfortunately, but the rest of the Libre Office suite runs neck-and-neck with Office, in my experience.

Re:It's a start

[Fnkmaster]

You have obviously never opened a non-trivial spreadsheet in Calc and Excel. Excel is way faster. But yeah, for trivially simple docs they are comparable.

Re:It's a start

[Anonymous Coward]

let us see see - if we just look for performance improvements specific to Calc we get this

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-5-new-features-and-fixes/#Calc
> Supports 10000 sheets and has improved performance for a lot of sheet operations (insertion of several sheets should be much faster now). (Markus Mohrhard)
>Performance improvement on the import of Excel documents containing a large number of form controls. (Kohei Yoshida)
>Performance improvement on the import of cell formats from Excel documents. (Kohei Yoshida)
>Improved performance on ODS import, especially with documents with large number of named ranges. (Laurent Godard, Markus Mohrhard, Kohei Yoshida)

www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/
>Massive re-work of external reference handling: External reference handling code has been significantly re-worked in order to fix a large number of defects in formula calculations involving external references, and to boost data caching performance especially when referencing large data ranges. (Kohei Yoshida)

With the other general fixes it should at least not be as slow as before.

Re:It's a start

[Billly Gates]

True MS made some crappy software that deservingly needs to be flamed.

However, they have made great software as well. Office however is one of the product lines that is fairly well. Outlook and Word may not be the best, but Access, PowerPoint, and Excel are awesome and are stars in the business world.

Novell Group wise and Lotus is far worse than Outlook so nevermind about the Outlook comment :-)

Re:It's a start

[bbbaldie]

If you can't make documents that don't "look like crap" without Office, I'd say you have wizard addiction. There's the rtf format, for example, and Libre Office will also create documents in native Office formats. Modest documents (read: no blinking lights, no fancy fonts, no scrolling text) look quite comparable when created outside of the Office environment. A valid point was made about complicated spreadsheets in the comment queue, but otherwise, weaning yourself from Office is step one in regaining control of your hardware and your budget.

Re:It's a start

[HJED]

I've found writer to be significantly faster then word. It is also just as usable, I defiantly wouldn't say the same for the rest of the suite though.

Re:It's a start

[RobbieThe1st]

Shouldn't you be using PDF for that anyway?

Re:It's a start

[gmack]

You forget that the file conversion between Office versions is far from perfect, in fact, we have a display machine with LibreOffice on it just to handle people who bring in PowerPoint presentations that MS Office won't even read.

Procedure: Load in LibreOffice, save, Open in MSOffice, fix glitches, save, load in PowerPoint Viewer.

The best part is that we can't use MS Office for the display because some presentations require an Office Permissions dialog to work and those will just display blank slides if Office is used in viewer mode.

Re:It's a start

[Dr_Barnowl]

Some recruiters want it as Word, because they scrape it into a database and they are too lame to get a scraper that works on PDF.

Re:It's a start

[TheRaven64]

Have you tried using LibreOffice on ARM? I tried it on my 800MHz Cortex A8 smartbook. Oh, the pain...

Re:It's a start

[Billly Gates]

Yep and job sites too.

Like the A/C I keep Word around just for my resume and the fact that I support Office for a living and need to learn it inside and out.

Monster.com only accepts Word documents the last time I looked so it can be searched. Also HR loves to highlight in yellow key parts of the resume and email managers back and forth with amendments to the resume.

In business vendors and customers will edit and email back documents. The cost of Office is well worth the price for this reason alone. Not to mention Access and Excel are great products.

Re:It's a start

[Billly Gates]

Speaking of which until last year I always emailed my documents in 2003 to cut down on variations that can cause issues with macros. Today, if they have Office XP they are incompetent and I would not want to work for them. I use the OpenXML format. No issues at all as even 2003 has the free add-on for opening the new format.

I have seen the error message that this file is corrupt and LibreOffice can fix that, but no one uses anything like Office 2000 and Office XP anymore to justify it unless you are editing very old files.

Re:It's a start

[Maxo-Texas]

My experience is that open office prints the same documents faster than microsoft. They were 100+ pages with 300ish graphics each created under word 2003.

Finally with word 2010, word wouldn't print them any more at all so I ported them over to Openoffice native where they became superfast.

Likewise for a few 5000+ line spreadsheets 20-30 cells wide in calc.

Now, I haven't shifted over to Libreofficeyet because it won't print transparent layers correctly in Draw but I will once that is fixed since it's the active stream and my first test cases for the word documents are that they are going to require some minor tweaks but otherwise they still print faster than word did.

I won't be going back to word ever tho.

OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Sorry, but Libre Office is an unusable mess.

1) Trying to update it. The updater complains about the quickstarter still running and it exits. It doesn't tell you what that is, or how to turn it off, or even present you with the choice of turning it off. So now what do I do? Any answer other than "Libre Office messed up the update process" is why Apple has too much money while the open source geeks are perceived as smelly losers.

2) Try to use Writer as anything more than a notepad? Forget it. I loaded our company's template that uses heading styles. It already had four headings which Writer numbers automatically 1 2 3 4. Fine. So I add another heading, expecting it to be "5". Is it 5? Of course not. Writer numbers my new heading as "2" with not a damn thing I can do about it. Does no one check the code for basic things here?

3) Try to use the export as PDF? You better check that PDF because if you think that in 2012 we are 20 years beyond WYSIWYG, think again. Export as PDF exported a mess with every single letter replaced with various-sized dots. Jesus wept, my Commodore 64 running GEOS outperforms that. And don't you DARE say there's something wring with my system becasue using a PDF print driver worked flawlessly.

So Intel, what are you gonna do about this?

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Libre Office is an unusable mess.

1) Trying to update it. The updater complains about the quickstarter still running and it exits. It doesn't tell you what that is, or how to turn it off, or even present you with the choice of turning it off. So now what do I do? Any answer other than "Libre Office messed up the update process" is why Apple has too much money while the open source geeks are perceived as smelly losers.

2) Try to use Writer as anything more than a notepad? Forget it. I loaded our company's template that uses heading styles. It already had four headings which Writer numbers automatically 1 2 3 4. Fine. So I add another heading, expecting it to be "5". Is it 5? Of course not. Writer numbers my new heading as "2" with not a damn thing I can do about it. Does no one check the code for basic things here?

3) Try to use the export as PDF? You better check that PDF because if you think that in 2012 we are 20 years beyond WYSIWYG, think again. Export as PDF exported a mess with every single letter replaced with various-sized dots. Jesus wept, my Commodore 64 running GEOS outperforms that. And don't you DARE say there's something wring with my system becasue using a PDF print driver worked flawlessly.

So Intel, what are you gonna do about this?

There's something wrong with your system!

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[CajunArson]

Yeah discovered an annoying bug when upgraded from 3.4 to 3.5 recently. The 3.5 version 1. refuses to use any of the perfectly functional cutom templates that I had made in 3.4 2. Barfs every time it starts up complaining that a "template already exists" and then subsequently refuses to use the template that already exists.... (this has shades of that !#%(&*!(%#& normal.dot in MS office).

Fortunately the error isn't fatal and I can continue to use the program, but even a trivial test of the upgrade program would have uncovered this bug well before 3.5 was considered "ready" for use. I'm not the only one who's experienced this problem either.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[aztektum]

Perhaps you'd have more luck paying Microsoft for the privilege of dealing with compatibility problems version to version (or even same version, diff desktop).

Your three complaints don't quite go far enough to suggest it truly is an "unusable mess". You're bitching that it didn't work with your companies custom template? And PDF export didn't work for you. I've exported to PDF many times without any problems. Maybe what your exporting is the problem (perhaps another custom template your company uses)?

I have deployed both Office 2k3-2k10 and Open/LibreOffice at businesses. User complaints were pretty much even. No one has the perfect office suite out there. Being a free software product, LibreOffice is pretty damn good.

Instead of whining about how free software developers have failed to provide you with free software that works exactly as you require, why not work with them to solve them?

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[westlake]

What are YOU going to do about it? you sound as if the libre office project owes you something because you deign to use it. It is the other way around.

It is this attitude that puts billions of dollars in the pockets of Apple and Microsoft each quarter.

The mega corp funds open source projects to advance its own interests. When a project doesn't measure up to the user's expectations the cord is cut.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[SplashMyBandit]

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.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[SplashMyBandit]

Nope. Microsoft Office is used because they made it the de-facto document standard with their ever-changing proproetary formats. How did it get to be so prevalent, well, for starters Microsoft was able to use undocumented functions to make Office run faster than its competitors. Plus, they had information about upcoming releases of the operating system well before any competitors had it - so that gave the Office team a good head start. The funny thing is that much of the Office functionality actually didn't come from Microsoft - the products were acquired and then integrated into the Office suite.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[caseih]

Please give more information. Items 1 and 3 are somewhat self-explanatory (even if I've never experienced the same problems), but as someone who regularly uses LO for things more than a notepad (including styles and headings and such) I don't understand your explanation of the headings problem. Please provide more information. Are you talking about outline numbering (#.#.#.#.# blah)? Or does this really come down to a MS Office compatibility thing? I'm certain LO supports the kind of headings you talk about. Maybe it doesn't translate them as well as it should from MS Office.

PDF export has worked for everything I've thrown at it so far. Fonts, everything looked right (not sure if the fonts get embedded though) for normally used fonts.

As for LO being a mess, well use what works for you. For me LO works very well, and I've done some fairly fancy templating with it. Though sometimes it's so much like MS Office that I swear I'm going to break down and learn LaTeX for doing anything other than a letter.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[retchdog]

you're both right. but, unless the linux kernel and x.org have s3kr1t apis that libreoffice can't use, this argument is a bit thin... i've started from scratch with both libreoffice and office2007, and arguing that libreoffice is functionally better in any way (apart from supporting an open standard) is ridiculous. personally, i even preferred running office2007 on cxoffice to running libreoffice natively. please leave the "secret optimizations" argument back in the 1990s.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[pz]

I use LibreOffice frequently. The one misfeature that is beyond annoying is subscripts. They, subscripts, happen pretty frequently in my field, and there's a long-standing bug with LibreOffice / OpenOffice saving documents that have subscripts as DOC formatted files. LibreOffice / OpenOffice gets it wrong, just plain wrong. Sure, those folks did a pretty good job at reverse-engineering the file format, but holy dotted I, Batman it's enough to make the ganglia twitch on that one bug. Save the file as ODT, no problems. Save it as DOC, and the subscript formatting information gets thoroughly wonked, and. there. is. no. work-around., I. have. tried. frelling. everything. Since my documents are often collaborative efforts with other people who use MS Word, saving to anything other than DOC (or DOCX) is not a viable option. And that's one of the many reasons I have two computers on my desk: one runs Windows for a small handful of programs that only run properly under Windows, and one runs Linux for everything else.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

How DARE you! But seriously, all these problems typically pop up on Friday afternoons with looming deadlines. Who has the energy to start Googling for half an hour for what should be basic functionality?

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Who said it was a MS Word template? Making stuff up is pretty lame too. It was a odt template, FYI.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

You make it sound like I owe my time to Libre Office when they can't even count 1 2 3 4 5. It's the other way around. You deign to release an office suite? Test the fucker first.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[flyingfsck]

There is something VERY wrong with your system.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[hairyfeet]

You forgot 4) Trying to edit and share files with the new generations is a mess. What I mean by new generations is those that use the ribbon. The ribbon, or as i like to call it "The divider of young and old" as the young love it and the old hate it, has caused folks to become a little more...shall we say artsy fartsy? I personally blame that quick mouse over preview that lets folks go through every combo in less than a minute.

So what you get is funky fonts with headers and footers and everything else they think looks slick. Try opening, editing, and saving back into .doc using LO and you are gonna get word salad as it does NOT like all the new Office artsy fartsy crap. this is fine if its Suzy sending a recipe to her mom, she can always tone it down and send again. if this doc could mean the difference between a job or a contract and not? Well you can't afford to have the thing mangled as it just doesn't look professional, it looks mickey mouse.

Don't get me wrong, I think LO has made great strides and does have its place, for example all home users that come through my shop get LO if they don't have MS Office because for the kinds of things home users are doing, writing down recipes or little Billy working on a paper he is gonna have to print? works beautifully there, no complaints at all. But as people go more nuts with fonts and bling bling crap LO really doesn't have an easy go of it. Sure if you hand it a standard TNR font with nothing fancy it does great, but once the bling starts getting added its chances of rendering and saving correctly go waaaay down, at least from what i saw.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[hairyfeet]

Oh please! learn your damned history...puppies, geez. MS Office became the de facto standard because what WAS the former de facto standard, that was WordPerfect, thought their shite didn't have an aroma and therefor put out a lame as hell DOS port for Windows which puked and died more than it ran and since it was really designed for a single tasking OS pretty much anything and everything could get its memory stomped on by WP and crash, including the OS. Word back then was fairly basic but it DID run and didn't chew the documents all to pieces when it crapped itself. BTW the original Star Office was released about this time and for its first couple of releases was a real pig with regards to memory was what you really did NOT want on the RAM starved machines of the day.

So learn your history kid, many times MSFT has ended up winning not by trickery, not by skill, but simply because their competition made some seriously boneheaded move and MSFT was able to capitalize on their mistake. Two great examples are the above WP and Netscape which frankly put out a giant rotting turd known as Netscape 4 which was so bloated and soooo buggy frankly anybody could have beaten it just by coming up with something that didn't crash constantly.

MS Office is now de facto because despite the myriad of boneheaded moves by the company they have been pretty good about leaving the Office guys alone instead of pushing for "vertical integration synergy" and all that other PHB crap. because of this I can open docs from 1997 in office 2K7 and they look fine and save without puking, try that with a OO.o 1.0 file and find out how quickly LO chokes on that old crap.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[SplashMyBandit]

VMWare or the free VirtualBox may be your friend in this case. Easy to run 'proper' Windows in a Virtual Machine and then you just have to have on machine on your desk :)

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[SplashMyBandit]

Actually most people who used Wordperfect preferred it - because the prefessionals felt so much more productive in it compared to Word (same deal I guess with the Linux CLI fans compared to the OSI-inducing clickity click of Window admin tools). However, Word was favored because it got great reviews and was often bought based on the number of checklist items in the review - including one that one reviewer described as being only of use to reviewers.

I'm glad Word works for you. However that is not the experience of most people. Classic case I can remember from several years ago. A mate's flatmate had finished her Master's thesis in Psychology (lamers used Word instead of LaTeX like real scientists). It was due to be submitted the next day. She went to print it and *the same instance of Word* went and scrambled the format. Fcuk! She couldn't revert it. So she went with my mate to his word where they had the same version number of Word. Loaded it up. It was mangled in a different way. She spend the *whole night* sorting the formatting out (usual stuff, Word is a lame word processor rather than a true typesetting tool). Printed it out. Sigh, relief. Took the thesis back to her place and it was messed up on her machine, no surprise there. However, the original version she had now worked for no apparent reason. For bigger documents (although the thesis was relatively mid-sized, around 150 pages). Like I said, it is great Word works for you or you don't notice any glitches. For plenty of people Word is just too lame - including me. Installed (a legal copy) of Word 2011 on my Mac and Word is dog slow - I get the Mac 'beach ball' wait cursor even when I'm not actively doing anything in Word. In contrast, LibreOffice is lightning slick and doesn't get it my way - no beach ball there and most of the 8 GB RAM free (while Word is a hog and maxes out a whole CPU core when doing nothing). Also, I can use LibreOffice no matter whether I'm on my Mac, one of my Windows desktops, a Linux machine, or on a customer site. Plus, anyone wanted to edit my stuff doesn't have to pirate the tools to do it. For me, and plenty others, Word may be very common but that doesn't make it less sub-par compared to the alternatives.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[LordLimecat]

The funny thing is that much of the Office functionality actually didn't come from Microsoft - the products were acquired and then integrated into the Office suite.

Please explain why, when I am evaluating software for deployment, that has any relevance.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[gwjgwj]

The problem is, that the rendering depends on the printer driver used.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[SplashMyBandit]

Ah yeah, but it affected the on-screen document too. That meant it was hosed for further editing. Business as usual for Microsoft. Read some of the Joel Spolsky articles on his time there (like hard coding "12" as a function return value to pass a unit test - it was what the Microsoft devs had to do to complete things under tremendous (artificial) schedule pressure).

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[Daengbo]

So you forget Microsoft's deal with the U.S. government to use it and with OEMs to bundle Word, which is really what made almost every large business move to MS Office. Oh, and that was the time when MS switched APIs on WP last minute on the roll-out of Win95, a confusion which the MS Office team didn't suffer from. A combination of savvy business and unethical behavior. That was and is Microsoft's business model. That's why they're still in court over the whole mess.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[gmueckl]

Not everything he said is a lie. LibreOffice Writer does not know how to handle styles with the Office OpenXML file format. I came across that issue quite recently.

Face it: LibreOffice isn't perfect, but it still works well enough for many purposes. Microsoft Office has the equivalent of a 10 year headstart through the sheer amount of money they can throw at software development and at times it shows.

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[TheRaven64]

It is this attitude that puts billions of dollars in the pockets of Apple and Microsoft each quarter.

No, the inability to properly estimate costs does. Development costs are not free. You have three choices:

1. Pay Microsoft or Apple for every seat and pay again for upgrades to fund their development.
2. Pay for the features that you need to be added to an open source project and then have no per-seat costs
3. Hope that someone else will do the paying bit of option 2 for you.

In the long run, option 2 is almost certainly cheaper than option 1, especially for a big company. There are a lot of companies that pay over a million dollars annually for Office licenses. If each one of these hired 10 full-time LibreOffice developers instead, they'd be paying about the same, but any bug that affected them would get top priority, as would any feature they needed. Instead, they pay Microsoft and hope that the features they want will appear in the next version. They don't get the priority though - $1m/year isn't enough for Microsoft to do more than occasionally send a rep to placate you with promises...

Re:OK, so now can we start making it usable?

[Daengbo]

1) I don't read Groklaw. I just linked to it for the court dates, etc. 2) Bill Gates was the CEO then, not Ballmer. You're trying to argue against history, here. The Gates and Ballmer eras are completely different. 3) Vista was released during Microsoft's probation and Ballmer's leadership. 4) And yeah, I remember it all because I lived through it. Seriously. It's all in the court records. Get some perspective and quit trying to re-frame the argument.

Signal to Microsoft?

[sprior]

If I were a cynical guy I'd take this as Intel giving Microsoft's cash cow the FU salute after Microsoft said Windows 8 would run on Arm based tablets. Good thing I'm not a cynical person - oh, wait...

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[causality]

If I were a cynical guy I'd take this as Intel giving Microsoft's cash cow the FU salute after Microsoft said Windows 8 would run on Arm based tablets. Good thing I'm not a cynical person - oh, wait...

Assuming that many people are petty and vindictive is not cynicism, it's realism, so long as you remain open to any exceptions you should encounter.

Having said that, if your suspicion is correct and Microsoft is on the receiving end of some corporate vindictiveness, well, it couldn't have happened to a better company. They may be tame these days as they slide towards irrelevancy, but they also have 25 years of bad karma to catch up with.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[symbolset]

On a related note, Intel's first smartphone runs... Android. Apparently Intel has finally got the memo. I wish them luck.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be cynical. I am the guy that has substiantial and EXTREMELY succesful Libreoffice deployments in the field with some very sophisticated document management going on with regular and power users. Half on Windows half on Linux depending on client site.

Microsoft Office is not going anywhere for the same reason the religion is not going anywhere: once the wetware between users ears fo retards sitting in front of computers is INDOCTRINATED into one way of thinking they are (typically) stuck in that frame of mind for the rest of their lives.

It is the nature of culture and beleif that keeps people shackled to Microsoft Offices and Macs or the world, and no amount of reason, good will or engineering will change that.

Well, not true exactly as I have enough pull and credibility with clients to direct and influence the wetware enough to affect change. Change on an individual level or even a cultural level that does not have a structure with strong thoughtleaders that value reasion and rational problem solving stand no chance of seeing change.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[causality]

And yet, even after all this time, I still haven't seen anyone state a compelling reason as to why it's true. What did Microsoft do that was so "evil"? Please enlighten me.

You're just as capable of brushing up on Microsoft's history since the late 1980s as I am. The gist of it would take only a few minutes of your time. Your participation here leads me to assume you are literate, so I refuse to spoon-feed you. If you can't be bothered to inform yourself about a topic that's not remotely obscure, then recuse yourself from this discussion like a respectable person.

Meanwhile, Google is sniffing your wireless network as their cars drive by, making your address book public to promote Buzz, and changing their privacy policies to benefit their data-mining AFTER you have already signed up for various separate services. yet it's only Microsoft that is OMG SO EVIL THEY MUST DIE.

Oh I see, you're using the most childish "logic" available: Entity X did something REALLY BAD, so anything bad that Entity Y does is A-OK!

I didn't mention Google at all, neither positive nor negative, because Google was not being discussed. If you have a fixation on Google, it is yours. Look, if this is a religious conviction or article of faith for you, just say so. That's fine and you're entitled to it. Dressing it up like it's a rational argument is what makes you sound like a spoiled child.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[sprior]

I've found that people who are not technical don't necessarily realize that Microsoft Office is a separate product from Microsoft Windows - they've never seen one without the other.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

Just because Google is evil doesn't make Microsoft less evil. It just makes them both evil. A trivial perusal of the Web would bring up information about why Microsoft is considered evil. Here is a light selection of keywords for you to start your research with: anti-trust; illegal use of monopoly; linux is cancer; ISO document standard bribery; Open Document Format vs OpenXML; licensing of MFC to crunch Borland and promote MFC over (the vastly superior) OWL; payment of computer manufacturers to bundle Windows instead of open competition; removal of Linux from Asus Eee; deliberatly hobbling OpenGL on Windows; deliberately hobbing POSIX-compliance on Windows (Windows needs POSIX for US Government contracts); deliberately hobbling Java on Windows (which Microsoft lost a court case against Sun over - but the tactic worked long enough for Microsoft to derive the essentially Windows-only C# and the .NET platform from Java and the JVM); Microsoft's attempts in the mid-90's to stiffle the open Internet by promoting NetBUI etc instead of open protocols (something they had to do a volte face about); trying to tie the open internet to Windows through ActiveX and Internet Explorer 6 proprietary extensions (which Bill Gates also famously lied about saying IE could not be removed from the O/S); I could go on but it ought to be enough if you have been paying attention for the last two decades. No one would mind if Microsoft competed hard but fairly. The truth is they don't - they use all sorts of morally shady tactics - which makes them evil. For that matter, neither do Apple. Apple is at least as bad as Microsoft, but at least Apple stuff (mostly) works a lot better. But just because Google and Apple are also evil does not make Microsoft any less evil.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

Not much surprise there. Intel contribute a lot of development effort to Linux. Android is the marketing name of a customised version of Java on Linux. Should not be a surprise that Intel went down this road. You are right, this is a good thing and I also hope they are successful with it.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[symbolset]

Not much surprise there. Intel contribute a lot of development effort to Linux. Android is the marketing name of a customised version of Java on Linux. Should not be a surprise that Intel went down this road. You are right, this is a good thing and I also hope they are successful with it.

Android is not "a customized version of Java". Please avoid confusing people with this phrasing as Java is a trademark owned by Oracle and Oracle is trying to say that Android is Java when it's not so as to get billions of dollars out of Google and incidentally kill Android. The word "Java" by itself is taken to mean an operating environment similar to the Android operating environment, but they are separately sourced and not the same thing.

Android is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel. It uses a virtual machine system called Dalvik which is incompatible with Java virtual machines and bytecode applications. Android runs programs typically written in the Java Programming Language (the free language specification, not the copyrighted operating environment) but these programs are compiled to Java operating environment-incompatible Davik bytecode and linked to non-Java Android libraries. Android uses certain public Application Programming Interfaces in common with Java, for the convenience and familiarity of developers.

Android also runs native applications written in C, C++ and a number of other programming languages linked both against the Android libraries and other development libraries in the "Native Development Kit". Android has some similarities to Java, as Linux has some similarities to Unix - but Android is not, has never been, and will never be "Java" any more than Linux has ever been or ever will be "Unix".

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[flyingfsck]

"What did Microsoft do that was so "evil"? Please enlighten me." Welcome caveman. MS got about 3 Billion Dollars in fines and ruined/hurt many small companies such as Corel, Stax, Trumpet, Mozaic and many more while you were hibernating.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[RightSaidFred99]

So? Ford hurt many buggy whip makers and horse breeders with his mass production of the automobile, was he evil too?

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

In my country you used to be able to by Linux pre-installed on Eee. You can no longer do this (for some time), despite Linux being just as popular as Windows for purchasers. Microsoft bribed Asus here so that Linux was no longer an option. As for citation, Google is your friend, see how many hits you get when you use the phrase "Asus and Microsoft join forces against Linux". In one example v3 confirms the report with Asus.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1941481/asus-microsoft-join-forces-linux

Now you may say that this is just hardball business practice. However, if you understand US law you'll know that this is illegal. It is illegal to use a monopoly in one space (desktop) to attempt to gain market dominance in another space (netbooks in this case). However, since Asus was paid and the Linux crowd lack the means to bring it to court then nothing is done (plus in 2009 the US DoC had been lax with MS for some time).

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[Daengbo]

Since Jonney Shih publicly apologized to Microsoft on stage for daring to show an Android netbook at Computex 2009, I think we can agree that he did that under pressure from MS. What kind of pressure? No one knows. To make a major CEO crawl and scrape, though ....

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[Daengbo]

Did Ford do it by illegal coercion and exclusivity contracts? Because that's what Microsoft has been convicted of. How about partnering with competing car companies, stealing their secret technology, and then using on Ford cars? MS has been found guilty of that (in the computer field) too.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...your link shows Microsoft PAID FOR AN AD. Are you no longer allowed to pay for ads because FOSS wants to be "free as in beer"? And did you look at the date? Xandros had already stopped updating by that time. Again do you HONESTLY expect Asus to place an unsupported OS on their units? finally a little link of my own you might find interesting and a far more likely reason they quit carrying Linux, which is a 400% higher return rate for Linux than Windows on netbooks. We are talking about a unit where the average profit per unit is $6-$8. At margins that razor thin literally more than a handful of returns can make the whole line unprofitable. Have you EVER sold anything at retail? If you'd have you'd know high returns are the kiss of death.

This is what never fails to amaze me about FOSS zealots and their perception bubbles. More people STEAL WINDOWS than have EVER used your product, even though your product is free, doesn't that whack you upside the head with a cluebat? Here it is 2012 and you STILL refuse to ask the single most important question: What are my competitors (and it is a competition) doing right that I'm doing wrong? Ask the retailers, we'll be happy to tell you. your driver model is horribly broken and like something from 15 years ago, your sound system is the buggiest POS I've ever seen with updates to seemingly unrelated systems causing Pulseaudio to puke and give silence or static, you still have figured out how to get a machine to wake from sleep, NONE of your devs follow the UI conventions, some use the Windows conventions, some use Mac conventions, some old school Unix which makes the whole experience disjointed. Basically the whole system feels like a bunch of different crap thrown together by people who never talk to each other....which is pretty much what it is. Hell even one of the largest OEMs on the planet Dell has to run their own repos because they can't even get enough QA from the so called "user friendly distro" to keep the drivers from puking, even though they sell less than a dozen models!

Waste your mod points all you want but this is a truth that needs to be spoken, it is THIS, this right here, that keeps Linux in last place. Somewhere along the way making F/LOSS accessible to the masses was thrown to the wayside in favor of the "FLOSSie club" as I call it, where You must prove your "worthy" of using the gifts the great Torvalds and RMS have bestowed upon thee. In this club anything that makes F/LOSS more useful, easier, and friendlier? why that is bad, its "rampant consumerism" or "dumbing down" and anything that makes Linux more complex, obtuse, or fiddly is "smarter" and "more powerful". I have actually been told by a member of the FLOSSie club when i pointed out that Linux was too CLI heavy for my consumers "to make them embrace the power of CLI" like its the Goddamn force!

A wise person once said "You know what the definition of insanity is? Its doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" and that is EXACTLY what the community has been doing. Insane release schedule, broken drivers, none of that matter because the users will embrace the power of CLI and learn "the Unix way" even though Unix was NEVER supposed to be a consumer OS and died out over a decade ago!

In the end its not a conspiracy, its not magic, hell Microsoft is being run by a bumbling idiot with Apple envy and you STILL can't get ahead! Have you seen Win 8? Its a fricking bad joke and you STILL won't gain any share, people will pirate Win 7 instead, why? Its because you DO NOT LISTEN TO US. You don't listen to the consumers, to the retailers, nor the OEMs, its a bunch of nerds scratching itches and having a "I'm moar leet!" wankfest. You're a good decade behind your competition, here we are in the great XP dieoff in a recession and NOBODY, not Best Buy

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

Ha! I actually use Apple as my primary OS. I also have a lot of Windows machines (and host several game servers for players all around the planet), and used to use Linux a lot for development (since it is vastly better and more stable than Windows if you have some skill). nb. if you haven't noticed Windows is losing mindshare. Linux in the guise of Android is destroying Windows in the mobile space and is starting to outsell Apple. Once people are used to Android and things not looking like Windows then Microsoft are hosed. All it takes is someone like Google to make Linux palatable for the masses and the economics will be against Windows (it'll still exist but it'll be avoided, just like Windows phones are). Fortunately Microsoft saw this coming a long time ago, which is why they are desperate to bundle things to Windows via DirectX, .NET, IE etc. However, if you haven't noticed the trend is already moving away from this. The desktop is not the only computing space there is, dontcha know. Once there is enough traction in other spaces then the desktop stronghold of Windows will be broken - once OEM vendors are no longer afraid to bundle only Windows with their systems (the real reason Windows is so prevalent, there is no choice when you buy it because Windows charges extortionate amounts to OEMs who don't bundle Windows exclusively - which was part of my original point). Oh yeah, and as of last week the WinTel monopoly is starting to fade - Intel are going to ship Android (customised Java on Linux) as well as Windows. The thin end of the wedge. Anyway, enjoy your dying O/S. All the cool stuff is happening outside of it. Don't worry that history has shown time and time again that the more expensive and supposedly superior product gets beaten - it'll take time and corporates to move, but the trend is heading that way.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

Oh, and replying to your return rate article. Like a typical Windows fanboi you read something that re-inforces your bias and then stop reading. How about you read this article that is *relevant to the ASUS Eee* that we were talking about, http://ostatic.com/blog/asus-ceo-says-linux-netbook-returns-on-par-with-windows
This is from the ASUS CEO himself.

Now we have all embarrassed ourselves online in debates. One good way to avoid it is to read widely, including seeking out articles made with the opposite point of view. Also try and obtain figures and where they are given try and find out what biases are in the statistics (that is, the limits of applicability of the numbers or the methodology used to collect them). A little wider reading and you would have discovered that the MSI article was sensationalist (as they often are in the tech world) and its conclusion has been debunked by later articles - pointing out things like the Europeans are for more likely to adapt and adopt new tech than the US market (this true general, the Europeans don't have as much tunnel vision as the US through necessity and wide exposure to different cultures).

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[RightSaidFred99]

Microsoft is guilty of being too successful. That's it. Any "law" they've broken is post facto. Some bureaucrat can look at some business arrangement and say it's "anti-competitive". What the fuck is the definition of "anti-competitive"? It's whatever your opponents can convince some government flunky it is.

They haven't been "convicted" of shit. They've been sued in civil court, consented to specific agreements to avoid bullshit lawsuits, or been told by heavy handed bureaucrats in Brussels to pay up or else. That's it.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[hairyfeet]

Wow, thanks, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Which part of "Xandros had ALREADY ABANDONED EEE OS" is not clear? By the time that the MSFT ad came out Xandros was ALREADY 3 kernels BEHIND and hadn't had so much as a single package update, not a single one. Now for the third time, why would Asus put an UNSUPPORTED OS on their shiny new netbooks? Answer? they wouldn't that would be stupid and raise their support costs.

And how about reading your own link? again asus is talking about an OS that was ABANDONED. Which means they either had to 1.-Fork the entire system and become their own distro, no small task as Xandros had many proprietary bits that were NOT GPL, or 2.-Quit selling Linux.....hmmm...not really a hard choice, is it? Spend untold millions or simply stop selling an unsupported product. you'll also note that MSI was talking about THEIR offering which was Ubuntu. Did you read MY link perhaps? then you'd know that Dell sells less than a dozen ubuntu units they can't even get enough QA to keep the drivers from puking so they had to go with #1, well guess what? try asking what Dell "makes" on Ubuntu, I dare you. I've tried, several reporters have tried, they all got nothing, why? Because DELL IS LOSING MONEY ON EVERY UNIT because they have to pay their own dev team. do you think they can make that up on volume?

Again the fanboi perception bubble rears its ugly head, you have 2 companies LOSING money, you have one with an abandoned OS, an abandoned OS that mind you was killed by a boycott BY the community because "ZOMFG they signed a deal with M$ ZOMFG!" so that one was entirely the community's fault. Now you tell me Mr Smart guy how EXACTLY is two companies losing money on every sale and one that has a dead OS considered a "success"? If that is what the community considers success then no wonder its lower than the margin for error in most polls. hell even on /. it has less than 2%, and this is a supposedly FOSS heavy site!

In the end its NOT a conspiracy, or some mythical money truck, in point of fact MSFT actually RAISED their OEM prices by more than 40% with Win 7, in part because they saw that Linux really wasn't a threat, its simply business 101: You don't give the customer what they want they'll go to someone who will, that's it. That's all. its so simple if it was a bug it would have bit you. Don't you think in a dead economy we retailers would LIKE to have an alternative? Sadly your product is a good decade behind everyone else. Sure it looks pretty, when it runs. but your driver model is crap, pulseaudio is a bad joke and is less stable in every way compared to ALSA, both major DEs threw out years of work and bug fixes to go bling bling city when everyone was going for low resource devices, its been one clusterfuck after another with the Linux community. Hell I could go on all day just listing the things that are wrong, but why bother? Nobody ever listens. I've written articles for LinuxInsider pointing out simple and cheap things the community could do to make Linux more attractive, know what I was told? "That sounds nice, you should do that"...right, because I have nothing better to do than go get a master's in programming to completely fix an OS I can't charge for, yeah no thanks. in the end mark my words just like Vista Win 8 WILL bomb and you will GAIN NOTHING. If that doesn't smack the community witha cluebat frankly they are too damned dense to worry about.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

Microsoft looses money on XBox360 sold. Sony loses money on every PS3 sold. Gillette loses money on every razor handle made. They make the money up on other areas because they are smart enough to do so. ASUS should have been making money on selling Linux units because it didn't have to pay anyone for the license. However, Microsoft often tips the scales by (illegally) paying vendors for shipping Windows (as in this case). Then the consumer choice is removed. This is my point. This is what keeps the Windows monopoly going. No large company is going to invest in developing an alternative because Microsoft uses a combination of licensing threats (removal of cheap licenses) and 'bribe' payments to bundle Windows exclusively. This is my point. When Win8 comes out and it sucks and people are forced to use it because they have no realistic alternative because Microsoft ensure there is no absolutely economic incentive for alternatives to be developed then we'll still get shopkeepers like yourself blaming Linux or Mac OS X for the lack of market penetration when the real reason is the lack of a free market and level playing field (one devoid of illegal monopoly payments). This is my point. Intel does exactly the same thing, but it is not illegal because it isn't using one monopoly to create another (unlike Microsoft). Oh, and while you're busy defending Microsoft's business practices (attributing the current state of the market to their 'superior' software rather than their business practices) I hope you love getting reamed by the unit pricing on Windows.

Notice how the Windows phones are such dogs the Microsoft have to pay the point-of-sales folks a direct commission to try and move them (but they're still not moving, lol). The (Microsoft) technology is perfectly fine but in this case the network effect (Apple and Android[Linux]) are already established. What usually works for Microsoft in new spaces (payments to vendors and exclusive licensing terms) failed here. The best tech doesn't always win. There are a bunch of factors at play.

Incidentally, it sounds partially is your view is because you are bitter with regard to Linux because your well-meaning suggestions weren't immediately jumped on by a legion of willing developers. You don't need a Masters to develop useful user-space stuff on Linux. Read about how this 60-year old retired civil servant made a difference instead of just complaining: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047633/one-writes-linux-drivers-235-usb-webcams

Hell, a great businessman would see an opportunity that perhaps Linux just needs a little polish and you could re-sell it using all the labour already put in over the years (Google did this with Android). With the Win8 opportunity coming up the time to start it is now. Not just whining about the situation like a lazy shag, but actually doing something innovative. Incidentally, I'm not in the O/S retail space. I have seen an opportunity in another space and am working towards that goal - and the software will run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Avoiding the Windows-only trap is just smart business.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[causality]

I see you still completely failed to cite anything evil.

No, I said I refused to spoon-feed you. Like I previously noted, you appear to be literate so I know you saw me say that.

In fact another poster did some of your homework for you. That was against my wishes, because laziness such as yours does not deserve to be coddled, but he did it and it is there for your perusal.

Congratulations on proving my point - you have no argument whatsoever.

So then, you do not dispute me when I say your "logic" is the most childish available? Good. You wouldn't stand a chance anyway. It would be like disputing me when I tell you that two plus two equals four.

Come back and have some facts next time.

If you want facts, I am not The Exclusive Source of All Things Factual. I don't own the truth and you're equipped with a computer and Internet access during the Information Age. Facts are not mine to give but they are yours to find. Just how conveniently lazy are you? You cannot be interested in facts, or else you'd research Microsoft's history yourself and nothing I say or do would stop you. You're just another little ego that must feel "right" at all times. That's why you won't look for the facts because they would contradict your "rightness".

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[hairyfeet]

Wow, you really CAN'T escape that perception bubble can you? Let me spell it out real sloooowwww...UNSUPPORTED ABANDONED OS, now tell me "smart guy" how are you gonna make money when you are gonna have to SPEND MILLIONS making your own fork? Answer? you're not so Asus did the smart thing and got rid of the UNSUPPORTED ABANDONED OS. and frankly I don't give a shit what the community does, i was asked to write an article pointing out what we retailers would need to sell Linux, that's what i did. I purposely went for the most simple and most trivial of things because with it being all volunteers i know the busted shitters as i call them, the broken driver model, the horrible upgrade system, those are frankly NEVER getting fixed. some of it was the most blatantly obvious, like "There should be a website where you can buy hardware that WILL work with your distro, instead of playing hardware roulette" and even that is frankly beyond the skills of the community apparently.

But you go right ahead thinking its big bad Bill and the ghost of Jobs kicking the dogshit out of you, when the simple fact is people would rather STEAL the other guy's products that take yours FOR FREE. And NO retailer will sell your product at B&M, none. Walmart, Staples, best buy, all have tried, all quit, why? because your crappy driver model and busted support system made their support costs for those units MORE than simply paying the cost of a Windows CAL. How many computers have YOU sold at retail? Could that number be....zero perhaps? I've sold computers since before there even was a Windows and i can tell you your OS is simply unsuitable for purpose, not usable at all for consumers nor SMB. The ONLY places it can work is those that have full time IT staff to deal with the crap, otherwise it falls down and goes BOOM! Waaay too damned often. I've said it before and i'll say it again, Linux IS Windows 98, its a CLI OS with a tacked on GUI that's a second class citizen in EVERY way, its drivers are flaky, updates and upgrades break more than they fix, and you have to spend more time fiddling with it than actually using the damned machine for the work you bought it for!

I have XP machines that have been out in the field 8 years now, with ZERO driver failures, that's two service packs, around 3000 patches and ZERO driver failures. Can you HONESTLY point to a distro from 5 years ago you can upgrade to current and not have it puke on its own drivers? Don't say LTS because i've tried it, both LTS to LTS and LTS to regular and it puked. XP is supported until 2014, Win 7 until 2020. That's 11 years with NO INSTALLS, no upgrades, no hassles. Show me a single distro that even costs the same as Windows where i can get those kinds of numbers, you can't. Face it you simply can't compete as Linux is free if your time is worthless. My time is $35 an hour which means 2.5 hours and I'd be better off buying a copy of Windows 7 HP and putting it on the machine. Now THAT is the reality that retailers face with your OS, no secret deals, no money trucks, simply the fact that your support costs make your OS useless for the masses.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

Lol. That's a low hourly rate to get paid. I guess Windows monkeys are a dime-a-dozen. You'd get a factor of three more doing multi-platform stuff (like I do). But that's beside the point.

> I have XP machines that have been out in the field 8 years now, with ZERO driver failures, that's two service packs, around 3000 patches and ZERO driver failures.
Wow, who's in the perception distortion bubble? I call total BS on this one. That is such an outrageous claim - you really can't be making it and expect people who have also been computing well before the DOS days to believe that WinXP is as reliable as Unix based systems do you? Those machines you claim can't be doing anything useful (Solotaire only?) - and clearly haven't had more modern software installed that require newer services and drivers. Oh yeah, these 8 year old machines won't be doing wireless either (the bane of Linux drivers).
Most high-uptime machines (that is, servers where all the real money is if your company is not Microsoft) run RedHat or CentOS. The really critical ones run Solaris. These are chosen because they are reliable (lol, the Windows Azure Cloud Computing platform has just had a huge outage - in contrast I worked on a large Internet scale system deployed on CentOS to thousands of nodes, no service-level failures there). Computing is not only the desktop but when you are a peon at the bottom looking up I guess that's all you see. The rest of the world is rapidly moving away from PCs (and Windows) for their computing needs except in some niches. There will always be some PC sales but the growth these days is negative (-6% per annum according to the latest Microsoft Windows sales). I hope you have an alternative sales career lined up.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[hairyfeet]

Actually I gave up a nearly $100 an hour job for this one because i got tired of dealing with "multi platform" corporate crapfests where some PHB would see some tits of a salesgal and the next thing we knew we'd have to deal with thousands in shitty hardware or software they'd bought. Oh and really sorry to burst your bubble but...guess what? i'm actually typing on one of those systems now. the customer traded it in for a new triple core and it was such a low power unit I decided to keep it as a nettop. Its a circa 2004 Sempron, 1.5Gb of DDR, 200Gb SATA, and the same install of XP, I just cloned the old 80Gb onto the bigger drive..that's it.

You see THAT is what i find so funny, you'll jump through flaming hoops for your "free" OS but think even the most trivial of common sense, like don't open attachments or don't go to dodgy porn sites, must be too hard. hate to again burst your bubble (no I'm not) but frankly there are more than a dozen free AVs out there and pair ANY of those with any browser other than IE and the machine pretty much takes care of itself. it updates itself, defrags itself, protects itself...tell me, what do you think the odds of you getting even a 5 year old Linux up to current without a single forum hunt or CLI crapfest is? I'd say 0.0%. Hell i can install ANY version of Windows from 2K-Win 7 with nothing but a single disc and a shared folder, that's it. you see THIS is why I can charge so cheap because I get paid by the machine more often than by the hour and i can have 3 or 4 machines being installed and it requires ZERO effort, just pop in the disc, point at the shared folder on first boot, go have a sammich. Hell with Win 7 I even make money while just goofing off as any of my customers can just pop up a "Help me!" on my chat client and i can take over and install their software, walk them through hooking up that new printer, it takes minutes and its $35 a pop and they THANK ME for it.

In the end though the simple fact is the numbers don't lie and the BS you're pushing has been pushed so damned many times they actually have a website dedicated To Linux bullshit and excuses. In fact i can just take the top 20 from that site and cover every excuse and BS about FOSS that has been ever used on this site, sad really.

BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised not too long ago? take a look and see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means. Oh and as for that much vaunted linux security, which you seem to think Windows can't possibly compare with? Get ready, but you're OS isn't doing so hot. In fact last time i checked Securina Linux had more critical rated vulnerabilities open than Win 2K3 or Win 2K8.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

nb. the CAs were compromised running Linux/CA because the CA (just like most of the supercomputers) have chosen not to run Windows (since it blows for real uptimes, y'know the ones you measure in years). Cool, enjoy spending your life goofing off.

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[hairyfeet]

So your answer is excuse 421, aka Linux Runs Supercomputers TM. How sad that the same crazy horseshit has come out of FOSSies so damned many times that i can pop up a TM for EVERY excuse? Now why I can do that? Because you keep running back to the same horseshit, kinda like religion in that way, sad really. Meanwhile my oldest is heading off on his first spring break, paid by me, my GF just got a brand new quad, the youngest got a new quad and if scanning around for his first set of wheels, if this is goofing off then guess what? Sucks to be you. I do what i want when I want and answer to nobody but me, ha ha ha!

Re:Signal to Microsoft?

[SplashMyBandit]

What is interesting is your need to defend Microsoft so vigorously and persistently. I guess you get jollies from that. Now the reason I mentioned supercomputers, and the fact that Linux pwns the CA nodes was to point out the fact that Windows XP is incapable of this (your beloved, since you appear stuck in the days of 1999; I mean, your security solution is to not use stuff, and avoid most of the web, seriously? that's 1999 advice) - since you seemed to insinuate that if Windows was on the CA servers they wouldn't have been hacked. Clearly a ridiculous and totally troll-esque. However, you run back to your little troll site and post a link, without even thinking about what is being said (and of course assuming that Windows has perfect audio support - sorry monkeyboy, it don't and is broken in some pretty fundamental ways too - like muti-drop outputs thanks to the DRM paths in Win7).

They say to never 'debate with an unarmed opponent' so I've been trying not to. However I'm always prepared to listen to whatever rational arguments you choose to make, in fact I welcome them, but so far what you've come up with is a pretty lame site obviously written by someone who is unable to perform even the most simple tasks with a computer (ffs, my mother runs Linux with a far better experience, better performance, and with fewer hassles than when I put her on WinXP - unfortunately it appears that even if she can use Linux successfully you cannot).

From what you have said your answer is to install WinXP on ancient gear and never upgrade; or to sell brand new stuff to customers but never think about the fact they can't get new drivers for their stuff in two years (this is where Windows and Linux really differ; Windows has fantastic driver support for two years after you buy something and then after that there is usually nothing; Linux always starts 6 months behind but the driver support gets better and better until the gear is around a decade old). Of course, you are only interesting in reading sites and information that reinforces your worldview (from 1999, when Microsoft still had mindshare). The world has moved on but it appears you have not, but clearly love to harp on as if you are some kind of guru (a 'guru' that struggles with basic setup in Linux, lol).

Oh, by the way, any monkey can spend money - I could brag about my spending habits but that would just show bad taste (if you understand the concept) and get further offtopic (which you appear to like to do). Like I said, please enjoy your little out-of-date bubble while the tech world steams ahead without you and your kind.

Re: OK, so can we stop bitching?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to update it. The updater complains about the quickstarter still running and it exits. It doesn't tell you what that is, or how to turn it off, or even present you with the choice of turning it off. So now what do I do?

Which package manager were you using to update it? Apt-get? Oh wait, you're still in the primitive Stone Age times of each app updating itself tediously.

Another satisfied Microsoft customer??

Any answer other than "Libre Office messed up the update process" is why Apple has too much money while the open source geeks are perceived as smelly losers.

Smelly loser, n., 1: Someone whose first priority in life is not pleasing you. That's the problem here, hence your bitchy tone. If you don't like something, don't use it and quit your bitching. If the free software disappoints you, I will personally give you a full refund, how's that?

Try to use Writer as anything more than a notepad? Forget it. I loaded our company's template that uses heading styles. It already had four headings which Writer numbers automatically 1 2 3 4. Fine. So I add another heading, expecting it to be "5". Is it 5? Of course not. Writer numbers my new heading as "2" with not a damn thing I can do about it. Does no one check the code for basic things here?

You submitted a bug report advising the developers how they can reproduce this bug, right? No? Oh then you're just bitching.

Try to use the export as PDF? You better check that PDF because if you think that in 2012 we are 20 years beyond WYSIWYG, think again. Export as PDF exported a mess with every single letter replaced with various-sized dots. Jesus wept, my Commodore 64 running GEOS outperforms that. And don't you DARE say there's something wring with my system becasue using a PDF print driver worked flawlessly.

Yes, don't you DARE do that, because that would mean you failed, and clearly that's absurd! Oh wait, here I go: there's something wrong with your system. *GASP*

Seriously dude, that function works fine on mine. Just tried it to check and it works. Works on mine, doesn't work on yours. Ok, maybe it's not your system. I think this is one of those PEBKAC errors, or maybe an "eye-dee-ten-tee" error. Obviously your calm, level-headed, dispassionate approach to problem-solving has produced the wonderful outcome you are experiencing, and I'd be a fool to think otherwise.

ID10T

Yes .... he installed garbage software

[Anonymous Coward]

I have years of experience using OpenOffice ..... and I have the same problems he is having while used the garbage distribution. Then again, the problem really started on OOo 3.2

You create a document with heavy formatting, save it, come back the next day to make changes and guess what happen? All the time you spent formating was a complete waste of time .... the document opens up all screwed up and unreadable. Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are so crappy that they can't even re-open files produced with them, and saved in the native format.

The worst part of LibreOffice is that the support for legacy documentation sucks worst than OpenOffice. And legacy means, old OpenOffice, WordPerferct and MS Office file. The distro with the stupid name is unable to open the files that the parent can without any problem.

Re:Yes .... he installed garbage software

[SplashMyBandit]

... and MS Word does a better job with retaining perfect formatting from older versions of Word? not in my experience it doesn't! LibreOffice does a pretty good job of retaining formatting for ODF documents - this is the format you should be using and converting everything to, it is the true ISO standard for documents. If you are really worried about preserving presentation then use PDF, this is what everyone else on the Web does. Also use a good tool for doing documents, Acrobat is a good tool for professional documents - word processors are designed for lightweight tasks only (which is why they blow for making professional documents larger than a few dozen pages).

Re:Yes .... he installed garbage software

[tbird81]

... and MS Word does a better job with retaining perfect formatting from older versions of Word? not in my experience it doesn't!

In my experience it does. After using OpenOffice (and now LibreOffice) on my home computer for 7 years, I am amazed when I use Word at work or elsewhere at how quick, easy to use and reliable it is.

It's not worth it to me to actually pay for the ease of use and consistency of Word, which is why I use Libre or GoogleDocs. But Word doesn't have the multitude of very minor flaws that LibreOffice has. I feel quite terrible for forcing my girlfriend at the time to do her essays and presentations in OOo all those years back! I should have just let her use her pirated version of Word.

Re:Yes .... he installed garbage software

[SplashMyBandit]

Hah! I love those who claim Word is better but don't want to pay for it. At least you admit to that. In that case why not use Acrobat if legality is not a factor? it is vastly superior to either Word or LibreOffice (although personally, the value proposition of 'gratis' is a very strong plus feature of LibreOffice, IMHO). Was your missus able to successfully produce what she needed too, even after doing contortions with OpenOffice?

Re:Yes .... he installed garbage software

[tbird81]

Yeah, but had to save things as PDF. Then get a PDF print-driver because printing direct to PDF wouldn't save italics if they weren't supported by the font. Then she wasn't able to edit it when at school. We'd lose references in the transfer to .doc and back. Positioning of illustrations would of course get ruined, and forget about using autonumbering. This was before Zotero, so we used whatever crap referencing thing OOo offered.

I had to save the gradient background of her OOo Presentation as a bitmap, otherwise the colours got stuffed up terribly on export to PPT. The few simple transitions used (e.g. final line hidden until click) would go awry.

Fortunately I was a student myself at that stage, so had plenty of time to waste. It was for her Masters though! We're not together anymore, but that's the one thing in our relationship I feel most guilty about!

in that case why not use Acrobat if legality is not a factor? it is vastly superior to either Word or LibreOffice

Because Word is a quick download, it runs fast, is found on every computer and looks exactly the same on every computer, and does anything we'd need it to do.

I've never used Acrobat, but when I think what Adobe has done to Macromedia Flash, and I think of the splash screen for Adobe Reader, and I think of that desktop icon that keeps getting created by Reader, and I think of the ease of use of photoshop for a novice - I think no way.

Word - quick; easy to get copy; well-supported; high compatibility; ubiquitous
Acrobat - no experience with this; probably bloated and awkward to use; not going to find on computer lab computer;
OpenOffice - slow; ugly; low compatibility for anything but simple documents; cumbersome;

Yep, if I could do it again I'd have borrowed that Word 2000 CD from her friend.

Actual press release

[Zarmvenius]

Here's the actual Document Foundation press release, without the adverts and typos:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/23/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-for-windows-from-suse-is-now-available-in-intel-appupsm-center/

How carefully did Intel think about this?

[Strange Attractor]

I've been watching Intel since the 1970's, and I've been impressed with their technical skill and business judgment. I didn't like what the Wintel duopoly did for computing/science/culture, but it made Intel rich. When Andy Grove canned employees at Intel Supercomputing for using Apples, I took it to mean that he believed that his company's future was tied to Microsoft.

Do you think the decision to join LibreOffice was made at the highest level at Intel? If so, I think it is an important shift.

Re:How carefully did Intel think about this?

[Osgeld]

if you have been really watching intel since the 70's you would know that the wintel duopoly did not kick into full effect until the mid 90's which was promptly greeted by competitors

They're not evil

[tbird81]

Microsoft isn't evil. Google isn't evil.

They are companies and want to make money.

Apple is evil - as they are a religion.

Re:They're not evil

[Dr_Barnowl]

I'm sorry ; I define an entity as evil when it knowingly inflicts suffering on the innocent for it's own gain or pleasure. I am aware of examples where Microsoft, at least, has done this. I'm sure that the lack of examples in my memory for Google is more to do with their relative youth as a corporation than their actual purity.

But, you say, a corporation is not a person ... but corporations are very keen on being defined as a person for purposes that further their interests. It's just when that corporate personhood starts to attract the ire you'd usually direct towards a human person that it suddenly becomes untrue.

The problem with corporations is that it only takes a few evil people to poison the corporate culture to the point where evil becomes standard operating procedure. Props to Larry and Sergei for recognizing this and attempting to enshrine resistance to this in their corporate culture from the beginning.

(but it's perfect for starting flame wars...)

[Qubit]

Sorry, but Libre Office is an unusable mess.
...

So Intel, what are you gonna do about this?

There's something wrong with your system!

And I think I know what it is. Just take a look at his username -- I think he may have turned his BBQ into a computer (or vice versa?)

Use case

[DrYak]

The use case for express gate isn't for people who want to sit down and work the whole day on mimcrosoft office.

The use case for express gate is :
- to quickly check emails / facebook / etc. (thanks to the ultra fast boot time and the built-in browser. You can turn-on, check what you want and more, and turn off, for the same time it takes to get windows out of hibernation)
- to use the laptop as a glorified media player (it's been available in BIOSes since the begining of CD-ROM. Now you just have a linux environment around it, instead of a simple CD-Audio player / MP3 player)

Now, once the user have been lured into it, it's possible to offer much more stuff (games for some quick casual fix while on the train, etc.)

Re:Use case

[icebraining]

You don't get it. At least half of the users go to those machines exactly for that use case: check webmail, facebook, maybe do a search. They still load Windows every time and they still reboot to Windows if they mistakenly choose Linux.

Windows is familiar, Linux isn't.

Re:Use case

[vlm]

Windows is familiar, Linux isn't.

Windows used to be familiar. The difference between the last decade or so of windows UIs is ... immense

Re:Use case

[icebraining]

Possibly; they still have XP. But even if the UI isn't, the name is. That's probably more important.

Marketing

[ossuary]

No matter how good LibreOffice gets, if no one knows it exists, it will not catch on. They really need to invest in some proper marketing some people other than geeks will know they even exist.

What the?

[TheNinjaroach]

Intel will also make available the LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE in Intel AppUp center.

There are a few too many proper nouns for this sentence to make any sense.

Intel supporting LibreOffice

[Christopher_T.]

The LibreOffice team has made a VERY determined effort to clean up the legacy code that's built up over the years. And while Intel is going to focus on Windows, I believe that any extra eyes on the basic code will end up in all the platforms LO supports. Be interesting to see what features get added. I doubt they'll go hog wild. I think the mistake that Microsoft made with Office is that Office 97 was about all most people needed, but they had to keep adding features to keep selling. One thing LibreOffice could do is push learning it more in schools. Microsoft really does this, and that's probably their most effective marketing.