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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?)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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!
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.
You should get a refund. Whatever amount you paid to learn how to troll, it was too much.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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 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).
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
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.
Who said it was a MS Word template? Making stuff up is pretty lame too. It was a odt template, FYI.
Mostly random stuff.
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.
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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