Slashdot Mirror
The LibreOffice Story
An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon in his latest column writes about the story of LibreOffice and how it rose out of the ashes of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Bacon also touches on why he feels LibreOffice is such a key piece of Open Source for communities across the world. Jono says: "To look at LibreOffice today and compare it to Microsoft Office can be tempting. Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast, but when I think of the before and after vanity shots of the suite back in 1999 and today, what the community has accomplished is phenomenal. Developing LibreOffice has been hard, technically challenging, and at times demotivating work, and contributors' efforts can be seen by millions of users across the world."
Utterly wrong. Where do you want me to start?
1. Licensing dispute
2. Reason for the fork
3. Rose from the ashes
4. Contention that Apache OpenOffice would exist if not for Libreoffice.
Happy to provide links for anything you're interested in actually discussing. Let me know.
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered. When you step up to more advanced features, which LibreOffice mostly have covered, you're talking about stuff that is used by a dedicated group of people. Then you have the features that are largely designed for corporate environments, which would hardly be ever used by individuals even if they used those features in the workplace. Even if LibreOffice doesn't support one of those features, it wouldn't matter.
So what those people are probably saying amounts to: they are comfortable with what they have and don't want to learn something new (may that be Linux or LibreOffice).
To be fair, I was unaware of much of the internal considerations going on at Sun, so their reluctance to engage may have also been a result of other forces, such as external management groups or constrained engineering resources.
I can't help but wonder how this guy managed to miss the thousands of layoffs from Sun that were happening at that time--one week, it was 6,000, the next it was 8,000. The company was losing money hand over fist, and projects were being shut down right and left. This was all in the press, too. So you'd think this guy could have figured out that we had slightly greater concerns right then than a freebie that was costing us rather than making us money to develop.
(Yes, I got to watch Sun implode, from the inside. Not pretty.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Talk to me when LibreOffice has an integrated email/calendar Outlook-like tool. And after that, let's see a collaboration tool like OneNote or Sharepoint...
One problem is that those, such as myself, who do use at least a few of the 90% of the "little used" features in MS Office then send thier documents to many others who have no idea that these "unneeded" features are being used. The fact a user doesn't know they are using a feature doesn't mean they are not using that feature.
In a home or very small office environment this is, of course, less likely. However, many of these people seem to find both LibreOffice and MS Office mindnumbingly complicated.
One area that badlly cripples LibreOffice adoption is, ironically, its horrible documentation (i.e. "help"). I regularly use an ancient version of office (no need to give MS more money than needed) that I acquired about 15 years ago and it's "help" documentation is head and shoulders above that of the latest version of LibreOffice. This is true for both "power users" and "casual users" needs.
No, I am not that convinced. Alas. Look at some basic bug reports, and how bugs reports are treated, and you'll find some abhorrent situations. Where it could shine, it didn't. Like surpassing MS Office.
First item: the silly image formats supported by MS Offce (only), to create a market for real formats, like SVG, EPS. LibreOffice simply dropped support, had a good number of bug reports some two years ago, and still pending.
It did much better than OpenOffice in colourful gadgets and widgets to please the eye of the casual user, yes, but did not focus on real technical improvements.
Equation editor. It is just okay, but not beyond. Still the same as OpenOffice. Does it import MS formulas? Does it offer a real WYSIWYG, or does one have to continuously click forth and back? The latter.
Did I write a number of bug reports to help out? Yes, I did. What I got was UNCO, or outright rejection, like 'try the most recent version, we think it has been solved'. How to try the most recent version if it isn't in the pools of my distro? And worse: When I tried, it hadn't.
All this makes me sad, because contrary to some other posters, I feel very confidently that LibreOffice is more consistent, better to handle, and overall the better alternative already today! And I can speak from some experience, since I was responsible for the layout of two books that you can buy on Amazon, and it did a great job. Also better than MS Office which tends to break any page layout with automatic page breaks of a floating text wherever it likes, depending on the version (2003, 2007), the underlying Windows version, and the mood of the day. Yes, with the same dictionary and same hyphenation. The author was at the end of her wits when MS Office had some 30+ pages with this, while in *Office all 511 pages were identical for author, and the two proof readers.
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
That wouldn't make a lot of sense, since my family and friends don't know what Linux is.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
It's true enough, but honestly, it needs to be prettier. I know it's superficial and stupid, and everyone here will say that LibreOffice shouldn't bother trying to look "pretty" or that it's already "pretty" enough, but here's the thing: I've always had terrible luck getting people to use LibreOffice. My impression is that there's no particular reason in terms of functionality, but it looks to them like it's a cheap knock-off of an old version of Microsoft Office. On both Windows and Mac, the icons seem a bit out of place, the UI takes up too much screen real-estate because things are kind of spread out, the default fonts and formatting are less attractive, the dialog boxes don't look native to the OS, and I don't even know what else people are reacting to. I think some people are confused by the way that it's sort of all one single application, but also a bunch of different applications, depending on how you launch it...?
Anyway, I can't get people to use it, even when it's exactly the tool they need. I've had an easier time getting people to use Apple's Pages/Sheets, and not for technical reasons, but because the app is prettier, the templates are prettier, and it feels easier to make a pretty document. At least, that's what I think the difference is.
But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.
Actually, last time I looked, there were completely free MAPI connectors to break out of that ecosystem, as well as Free exchange clients that cover most, if not all functionality of the Outlook/Exchange combo, including calendaring.
It's been a while, so I don't remember the links anymore and I didn't take notes unfortunately, but they were easy to find (I believe, I started drilling down from sogo.nu and the enterprise gateway all in one live-cds like Zentyal, through which I found openchange). This was a bit from the other perspective (i.e. replace Exchange, not necessarily Outlook, but even that area benefitted from a huge improvement in relation to ~10-12 years ago, when I last was looking for that).
There are many tiers to MS Office. There is the Home and Student, the Small Business, the Standard...
Does anyone know how LibreOffice compares to them?
IMHO, LibreOffice has more features than MS Office Home and Student, but cannot substitute the higher tiered editions of MS Office.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Mod parent UP!
The poor UI limits LIbreOffice.
The poor UI also limits Microsoft Office, but many people have had to learn Microsoft Office as a condition of getting a job. (Microsoft Office: Often weird, unexpected things happen.)
I talked with this man at OSCON 2015:
Robinson Tryon
QA Engineer & LIbreOffice Community Outreach Herald
The Document Foundation
qubit
(AT)
LibreOffice.org
I offered to help improve the LibreOffice GUI. He is enthusiastic about that.
My first recommendation: The icon for Italics should be a capital letter I, not, as it is now, a lower-case italic A. (An I with a top and bottom line.)