Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

LibreOffice Ported To Run On Wayland

Posted by timothy on from the onwards-and-up-words dept.

An anonymous reader writes: LibreOffice has lost its X11 dependency on Linux and can now run smoothly under Wayland. LibreOffice has been ported to Wayland by adding GTK3 tool-kit support to the office suite over the past few months. LibreOffice on Wayland is now in good enough shape that the tracker bug has been closed and it should work as well as X11 except for a few remaining bugs. LibreOffice 5.0 will be released next month with this support and other changes outlined by the 5.0 release notes.

5 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. What's the point? by amalcolm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What does Wayland solve for me, a standard Ubuntu user? What I have wordks ok, why does it need to change?

    --
    Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
    1. Re:What's the point? by kenaaker · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This statement is fundamentally crap. Every day I run multiple kde 4 applications on multiple systems back to a single desktop with ssh. The applications are not degraded and I don't have to disable any X11 features to do it. Occasionally I even use OpenGL applications remotely and they perform just fine.

    2. Re:What's the point? by prefec2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Beside your tone, you also missed the point. X11 is a graphical terminal technology where an application sends UI draw information to a server which renders it into graphic memory which is finally displayed on a screen. All input is collected and transmitted to the application. The server understands a simple protocol based on graphical primitives including fonts. In later years the font feature got extended, but the principle was not violated by that extension. The problem started when people wanted to use 3D and watch videos. Also audio was outside of the scope of X11 and of course printing. The addition of video required direct hardware access to be fast enough (especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s). Therefore, stuff like DRI where realized, which broke with the X11 principle that an application sends drawing information to the server which then does all the graphic stuff.

      I hope that clears things up.

  2. When the fuck will I be able to use Wayland? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    I use Debian unstable.

    Every now and then I get the urge to try Wayland.

    What I'm expecting: I 'apt-get install' a few packages (or even just a metapackage), maybe run a command or change my init level, a Wayland session starts, and I'm presented with a OS X- or even Windows-like desktop environment that's reasonably responsive and works reasonably well.

    I'm not looking for perfection, but just something that's at least as usable as X.

    But that's not what I've gotten any time I've tried.

    I end up not being able to figure out how to install it using Debian packages.

    So I end up trying to build it from source, but this usually fucks up in some way, and I'm not going to waste any more of my time hunting down obscure dependencies or fixing dumb build problems.

    The best result I've gotten so far was some Debian package or something that let me run Wayland in a window within an X session. It was utter shit. Slow as all fuck, and useless.

    How in the fuck can I, as a Debian unstable user, install Wayland as my primary graphical environment, and have it so I can do really basic stuff like open an xterm and run a web browser?

    At this point, even that piece-of-shit Haiku OS has a graphical environment that works far better than Wayland, and Haiku OS is developed by like a couple of guys.

    When the fuck will Wayland be usable on my system?

    1. Re:When the fuck will I be able to use Wayland? by FranTaylor · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Thanks, Fran. You've just made the entire open source community look like a bunch of useless assholes once again. Here we have a user asking a legitimate question, and instead of just answering the question you treat that user like dirt.

      Duh, when it's ready to go, it's ready to go. When it's not ready to go, it's not ready to go. No amount of hand waving and

      Normal people don't like being treated like crap

      Since when do "normal" people compile debian packages from scratch?

      Wayland too will remain a niche product, all thanks to people like you

      Yeah, wayland will fail because I posted on slashdot! World domination is MINE!