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LibreOffice Turns Five
An anonymous reader writes: Italo Vignoli, founding member of The Document Foundation, reflects on the project's five-year mark in an article on Opensource.com: "LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity as community project leaders. At the time, forking the office suite was a brave -- and necessary -- decision, because the open source community did not expect OpenOffice.org to survive for long under Oracle stewardship."
The project that was OpenOffice.org does still exist, in the form of Apache Open Office, but along with most Linux distros, I've switched completely to LibreOffice, after some initial misgivings.
Microsoft Office is 24. That's 4.8x better!
Frankly it depends more on what you use the word processor for. If it's business and most of your clients use MS Office, then cough up the $100 a year and get Office 365 (includes an offline copy of Office). If it's for personal use you could arguably do alright (I've not had many problems with *.docx files) with LO. However, and I know this will get attacked, for $150 it's a one-time fee and you get the full copy of Office (or you could pay $100/year and get an always updated copy of it).
1) Libre is preferable to Open - it has more developers and because of how it's licensed it can adopt all the changes Open makes - not so the other way around.
2) Compatibility with .docx sucks. Compatibility with Excel is _terrible_.
3) I don't trust LibreOffice to output documents that won't embarrass me in front of my boss. People will say "PDF", but bosses always want to edit things.
I'm sure it's a useful office suite - it frustrates me no more than MS Office does when I have to use it. And some of its tricks like opening PDF documents for editing (in Draw) are very useful.
But I keep a Windows VM for various programs, and Office is one of them. Bottom line is, the only code that's good at being compatible with MS Office is.... MS Office.
If I had my way we'd do everything as version controlled Markdown, but I'll never get my way.
TROFF and ED, you heathen!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My guess is probably better than opening the previous version of a Word file in the current version of Word.
Time to offend someone
1) Are there any genuinely significant differences between them that make one preferable to the other?
Mostly that LibreOffice seems to have the more vibrant development effort behind it. OpenOffice seems to stagnate by comparison. I'd recommend trying both (they're free after all) but LibreOffice will fit most people's needs better I think. I think LO is a bit more feature rich today.
2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files?
Usually but no guarantees. The more complex the document the worse the chances of it working well. That said, I've standardized our company on LibreOffice and it's been quite a while since I've had to drag out a copy of Word to view a document.
3) Do either of them save as .DOCX or .DOC, since that seems to be what most employers and recruiters insist on sending/receiving?
Yes they can do it and it does DOC fairly well in most cases. Just don't get too fancy with the formatting. I usually send PDFs to employers however.
Same here, AFAIK LibreOffice was better than OO.org right out of the box. The project was overdue for a fork and just needed some motivation for it to happen, and Oracle provided it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
>3) I don't trust LibreOffice to output documents that won't embarrass me in front of my boss. People will say "PDF", but bosses always want to edit things.
Then you better use the same exact version of MS Office with the same fonts installed on your machine....
I wouldn't even consider OpenOffice at this point. LibreOffice is where all the big development happens. However there is still a risk that it will mess the formatting of Word docs. I personally plan to just purchase the fresh Office 2016 and live a relaxing life.
2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files?
Nothing properly opens DOCX files, including most versions of Microsoft Office.
It's docx. Don't rely on a document created on one computer, even using MS Word, to look like it will on another computer. Lines and pagination will change. Tables will change. Anything with spacing will change. Trying to open the document in another word processor, like LibreOffice, pretty much guarantees that layout will not be the same. Your beautiful one-page form with blanks extending across the page to the right margin and tables and hookers and blow will turn into two pages that don't align, and your hookers will turn out to be trannies who have already snorted all your blow.
This is why many people prefer LaTeX: LaTeX is a psychobitchmistress who won't even respond unless you please her just right, and she'll never give you what you expected, but it will always be mindblowingly good when you do get something out of her.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update
That'll get your Windows box upgraded to the new version just fine. *nods*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Ok, we can argue all day about the relative merits of LO vs. MSO. That's nice and all, and I don't really care which one you prefer. That's up to you. But there's still something important we should be doing; even those of us who prefer MSO. Tell your friends that OpenOffice is dead, and they should look for LibreOffice instead!
OpenOffice is the name that people know. It's been around for years. And a lot of people have tried it and found it satisfactory. You'd be surprised. And a lot of these people don't know about LibreOffice. Some of them may even still be using OOo. (I had one friend-of-a-friend who had been puzzled by the lack of updates for the last several years, but had never bothered to investigate further.)
Now, claiming that OpenOffice is actually dead may be a mild exaggeration, but I think it's close enough to true to make it worth saying. The project seems to have lost most of its IBM support, which is really the only thing that gave it any hope, post-Oracle. It operated without a release manager for nearly a year, and recently lost its project lead. It's been being distributed with a known security vulnerability since April, and they haven't even been able to put together a point-fix release, let alone a full new release! That's an effectively-dead project.
Open Office is dead! Tell your friends to get LibreOffice instead, if they're interested in something like that!
Forget about whether you think LO is adequate or not. Forget about whether it fits your needs. Tell your friends that they should get LO instead of OO! If you're on social media, post something there. Let people know about LO. I think you'll be stunned to find how many of your not-so-geeky friends are quietly running AOO or even OOo, and really need to know that they should switch to LO!
Governments don't understand how important LibreOffice is. They should support LibreOffice for all government work. The would be FAR cheaper than being abused by Microsoft.
Government employees would soon learn to use LibreOffice.
But: The user interface of LibreOffice needs to be improved. There are many, many hassles, at present.
Also, it seems that Microsoft Word has problems that even people at Microsoft don't understand. I've gotten the impression that the code and underlying design is a mess.
Mod parent up. That, it seems to me, is the beginning of a realistic assessment of the difficulties.
These ideas may be useful in seeing more of the long, difficult story:
1) Governments are spending billions. There is money for doing the job correctly.
2) Libre Office could have an option to make the user interface whatever is familiar to the user.
3) The MariaDB CEO seems sensible to me. He seems like the kind of person who could coordinate moving away from what I understand are the many, many problems of SharePoint. (But, of course, I haven't investigated that in detail. I had only a short conversation with him.)
4) The "transitional process" could be carefully designed to take one step at a time.
5) The Excel transition seems difficult to me. I have ideas about that too complicated to mention here.
6) Microsoft has, apparently, been slowly killing Mozilla Thunderbird. Most of Mozilla Foundation's money comes from Microsoft through Yahoo for making "Yahoo Search", which is actually Microsoft Bing search, the default in Firefox. Somehow the Thunderbird user interface is being damaged. The damage looks deliberate to me. So, the world needs a comprehensive open source email client.
7) I've noticed that technically-knowledgeable people usually don't deal very well with conflicts or abuse. That is, however, what we need.
8) Microsoft's business is deflating. Sooner or later people won't need another version of an operating system, or another version of office software. So, Microsoft is trying to get more control of Windows customers by making Windows 10 even more dependent on Microsoft. It is easy to guess that the unhealthy dependence that exists now will become far worse in the future.
9) Governments can say that they will buy no more new versions, only additional copies if needed.
10) I wrote an example of ideas about living with older software: Microsoft Windows XP "end of life": Conflict of interest. Many people who do routine things every day don't want new software, with what they view as the annoying necessity of learning new methods of doing the things they already know how to do robotically.
11) There is comflict of interest. If Microsoft delivers very few needed improvements in each version, Microsoft can sell more versions.
12) Unfortunately, the world doesn't have very many people who are both technically knowledgable and socially sophisticated enough to coordinate that work.
Those are 12 more ideas. I'd love to see 100 more. Humans found a way to cure polio. We can find a way to cure unhealthy dependence on flawed software.