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Intel Joins LibreOffice
New submitter dgharmon writes "The month of February is a month to remember for the LibreOffice project. They formally incorporated the foundation in Berlin, released 3.5 with major changes and now Intel is joining the foundation as a member. Intel will also make available the LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE in Intel AppUp center. Intel AppUp Center is an online repository designed for Intel processor-based devices."
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
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
FTW!
(fuck Oracle)
s/IBM/Oracle/g;
(Was that a bad troll, comparison, or brain failure?)
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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.
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!
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.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
On a related note, Intel's first smartphone runs... Android. Apparently Intel has finally got the memo. I wish them luck.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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?
No sig for you!!
You should get a refund. Whatever amount you paid to learn how to troll, it was too much.
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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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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.
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".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling this. You're too intelligent, and not desperate enough. Can you just start over?
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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.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
Who said it was a MS Word template? Making stuff up is pretty lame too. It was a odt template, FYI.
Mostly random stuff.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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).
Shouldn't you be using PDF for that anyway?
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.
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.
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.
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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:
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...
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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.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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).