And how does it compare to my preferred EnGenius? Those mentioned don't look like professional stuff; rather like top products for the advanced home user, sorry to say. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks for your kind words! (b***s***). I beg to differ, because I foresee - not actually, but it will come - the day when I take a smartphone with me all the time, and plug it into a dock at home or work, to continue where I have left off. Currently I am not there, though I own a lenovo ('S') with docks at home and at work, so that I can carry this (still in a backpack) to wherever I go, including holidays, to always have with me what I need and want, with actual relevant data in the cloud. This suits me totally, except of the size of the current machine and its weight. Once a smartphone is powerful enough (8 GB of RAM, multicore @ 2 GHz, uHDMI - am not a gamer) and allows me to apt-get like my desktop, I'll be the first person to buy it. When I'll be on the road, in a bus or train, it'll be a normal smartphone, and when docked it will be a normal PC with monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers connected to the dock. And, no, I don't consider clutching any smartphone against my ears when phoning as comfortable, so when docked, a basic free-hands phone application will be my piece of the cake. Logically, a unified interface would be the DE of choice, adapting to the screen size intelligently, not just scaling up icons to a threatening size like Unity. Not like Plasma 4 with almost nothing visible on smaller screens due to just non-scaling ('Search and Launch'). While I hate the old 'Metro' interface, it goes the first steps into that unified direction: On Windows Phone 8.X it is a usable interface, and it tries to become usable also on a large desktop screen. I can only hope that Plasma 5 will go into that direction, too, and just be much better.
This is not good news. I'm a FOSS person, and love choices. Though I'd have loved to actually see the 'year of Linux on the desktop', and the confusing DE-mess (confusing to the new user, at least) was one of the reasons for it to not happen. The wannabe convert was so glued to the concept of 'the interface is everything' that she couldn't grasp the concept of 'the interface is just another layer'. And that 'learning' of 'yet another interface' was perceived as 'just too much'. That's the drug dished out by Windows, mostly, that some silly icon on a screen is the application. And the task bar was never a good workbench in Windows in order to understand that you take applications like tools from a toolbox. And you put them back, if you don't need them temporarily.
So wars were fought about Desktops, and rather introvert nerds designed DEs like there was no tomorrow. And while I'm on KDE for many years now, they ought to have been hanged for the early Plasma versions. Likewise those who messed up Gnome. My preferred DE was the Gnome 1.4 of last millennium. It did exactly what I wanted it to do. Gnome 2 got me to KDE, and Plasma to XFCE. And Plasma after 4.5 back to KDE. How the heck can anyone expect a 'Linux on the desktop' if desktop design decisions are handed over to nerd developers with nothing but time and ideas on their hands? And no governance that stops silly 'rewrites' and 'redrafts' of whole concepts for ever more shiny applets and widgets? The latter is fine, but not in mainstream DEs like Gnome, KDE. The W95 design has been with us for almost 20 years, with minor additions, and those were already perceived as 'too difficult' by many Windows users.
So what we get with TDE is a fall back for which I bet that there is no future. It can't because the only change necessary is the one that was done on Windows, and is currently done with Plasma 5: adopt a DE that can be unified for desktops and small screens. And exactly that is not done on TDE.
In a nutshell: TDE is the desktop (fork) that nobody needs.
Forget the stupid AVs. They need streets, follow traffic rules, can relatively easy be searched, might even get stuck in a traffic jam at prime time. A drone with GPS guidance and environment awareness can fly sufficiently close to buildings, too close for flight radar, does not need any street, cannot be searched, only taken down. If equipped with poison or explosives, the drone might not hit the target, and yet will be anything but pleasant. The only downside is the payload. You can't load her up to kilotons TNT, though, on the other hand, the potential precision is much better, and the payload can be deposited - in average - much closer to the target.
I'm sorry for you, but you did a thorough research without finding the relevant semantics. Otherwise you could not have titled me as 'UMNO propagandist', because what i wrote is exactly the opposite of what UMNO is trying to instill into the population. Namely, that the Malays are the indigenous population. If I had much more time on my hands, I'd find out some academic articles, including by prominent Malaysians, that this is exactly not the case (Malays being there for thousands of years). Alas, you are also mistaken w.r.t. the immigrants. The first Chinese settlements have been there around 1500 AD, when Malacca was about the centre of trade in South-East-Asia.
Remains your kind suggestion of me being an idiot, because - and I cite - 'this is an American site'. Wow. Your logic is quite remarkable. Because the United States has been around for only 250 years, I am supposed to be an idiot for arguing in longer periods of time? Or maybe you simply misunderstood the whole matter, since I never questioned anything close to your example of the Romanians. The only thing that I questioned, and I am in the good company of science, is that the Malays were the natives of the Malaysian Peninsula. And i am in that same company, when I state that about 90 % of the Malays have landed in that region as a result of migratory activities, whenever those might have happened.
Even though you are AC, I correct you: Your assumption is possible, but in reality it is a bunch of oligarchs that hide behind Islam in order to con the simple people, who are, as we have learned in other posts, forced to be Muslims. This is - by the way - expressed in the law of the land.
You are objectively incorrect. I don't have to pull out the resources, everyone can do on her own. There are camps where people who desire to leave the Islamic religion are interned for weeks, and months. They are called 're-education camps' where some Imam tries to convince them of the beauty of the religion. True, it is not life imprisonment, but against basic western understanding.
Alas, wrong. But you couldn't necessarily know. The Malays have not been lving there for thousands of years, 90 % are migrants from other places as well, from the overcrowded Malayan Archipelago, driving out the native population ('Orang Asli'), who are in these days more often that not forcibly converted to Islam.
Yes, you fell for the usual official propaganda, which is shown by your second last sentence. That's the official formulation. Don't forget that in 1969 close to 2000 people were slaughtered in a large inter-ethnic unrest. The previous dean of the Institute 'ATMA' (Malay and Islamic Civilisation) at the National University of Malaysia formulated it more correctly: "Malaysia is a country in stable tension".
Insightful? Hmm. Do you really know the situation in Malaysia, or are you arguing out of some emotional arousal? The Malaysian constitution prescribes favorable allotment of jobs and university places to the members of the ruling, majority, ethnicity, the Malays. And this is not just in writing but implemented. Malaysian citizens of Chinese or Indian ethic background see it happen that a student with straight 'A's is denied a university education in the public universities while a mediocre Malay student is gladly admitted. Wow! There is even a university with 140000 students exclusively for students of Malay ethnicity. Check UiTM in WikIpedia if in doubt. Malays get monthly allowances for their kids, the others ethic groups don't. All chancellors of all universities are Malays, almost all deans (with very few exceptions) are Malays due to the constitutional 'preferences'.
I think I can stop here, and I am arguing based on 12 years as university lecturer in said country.
Now the ball is in your court: I don't have much of insight into Israel, maybe you can enlighten me on the situation in Israel, please? Maybe I can learn something from that.
Some mods are trying hard to mod down not on objective reasons, but on political and subjective dis-/agreement. Sad. Don't take the down-mod too seriously. Probably your last sentence infuriated a proud US citizen.
How interesting, your comparison of Lessig's campaign and Xinhua News. Is it? Some mods seem to think so, I don't. Since i have no mods points, I have to write that is more of OT. Lessig's campaign is not without context either. Enough.
Why AC? I have created some pages, and found them deleted likewise. No, not about family members or stuff, but as a starting point to collectively collect sparse information about some almost forgotten actors in not almost forgotten movies. Actors that have impressed me one way or another, despite minor roles. Why is it so wrong to start a wiki page on person XYZ who pops up in the credits of a movie as cinematographer or actor, and put in a few lines, as many as I can do, a link to the IMDB entry of the movie, and over. Maybe in a year, or a decade, or a generation, some family member or another fan finds that entry and can make it grow. With deletion, we have this unique opportunity of information collection removed.
No, the country can't be 'fixed' by changing one law. And Lessig doesn't say so.
But no amounts of laws can 'fix' a country that is governed by people who could only make it into government by buy-ing into politics of powerful sponsors. Sponsors who expect the elected ones to push for the policies of the 'generous' sponsors. So make it two steps: First remove the decision of the sponsors on who can become a candidate. Second, get candidates that are determined by the (voter) population alone.
Someone asked 'why modded down'?. Whoever that AC was, let me point out that I agree with that mod by answering your question: Firstly, all sources have to be laid open. Affiliations included. Secondly, your post is not quite on topic, because Lessig has never said anything close to 'censoring'. Watch his talk at TED. He wants the result of elections to be a result of the votes alone, like written by the founding fathers. When the idea is, any candidate, irrespective of funding by 132 (watch said talk) individuals can make it, this is no censorship. On the contrary, if 132 (or 144k, watch the talk) decide on the candidate to run, that would be censorship, since the US has rather 144M voters.
I doubt that you consider funding by some party expecting 'returns' after the elections as 'democratic'. Therefore, some system must be put in place to limit, yes, limit, funding in a way that only altruistic campaign donations are possible. If you consider a reduction of corruption as 'censoring', that's your perspective.
Would be nice, but isn't. Peer-review is a crazy thing, I agree. Too often my own contributions were not understood, or deliberately brought down for offending the reviewers' personal opinions. Too often my own reviews were lousy, or I didn't understand the papers, or brought them down for not agreeing with my opinion.
And yet, the process as such has often resulted in my re-thinking my own papers, improving them, and often my reviews have resulted in papers of others being improved. Try this in blog format, and 90%+ of a******s don't have a basic idea what the whole thing is about, and those who'd know don't come to view it. No, academic progress is not possible in selfie format, but in collaborative ways, with ever changing contributors.
[why AC?] If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, even as AC. That's exactly the situation! You can as well see the standing of public U-s in the USA vs the private ones. 2 generations ago the public U-s were often great places of academic activities, and with a high standing (leave out Harvard and a few more). Recently, the funding for the public U-s has gone down, and businesses have bought in. As of 2015 ever more public U-s are on the decline while private ones rise. Naturally. Naturally? Naturally; in case one agrees with academia and tertiary education as just another business area.
Personally, I'm much too old to buy into this crap, though when I talk to younger colleagues, for them all this sickness seems just plain normal. The worst part, at least to me, is the consequence over the long run: when almost all third party funding is done from business-minded people with 'industrial applicability' within less than 3 years, we obtain some serious refinement of existing technologies in the best Confucian sense. But why did China drop off the scientific map centuries ago? Because their inventions, from porcelain to dynamite saw but small refinements, but no larger work, no application beyond a narrow field. In short, effective stagnation. So the Europeans could harvest everything and re-invent it. Back to the topic in question: Who in our days is given the liberty and the funding to think the thoughts (often enough out of the box or ready applicability) that can lay a foundation over one or two generations into the future?
How long did it take to rotate an image in Writer without copying to Draw, rotate it there, and copy it back!? It was filed March 17th, 2002 (!!) against StarOffice. It was filed, again, February 17th, 2011, against documentfoundation.org. It was - drumrollllls - solved on July 2015. This points to a serious bug in governance.
With pleasure: Nothing. I wrote that the bibliography in MS Word is 'so superior'. The equation editor of MS Word has its pros and its cons. Should anyone so desire, I could make a detailed comparison, though I think they'd come out pretty close. What could be improved definitively - and that's what I wrote - is the UI, the see-what-you-get. Because when you open a New Formula, you get a tiny little piece of window somewhere in your document, and then one starts writing, newlines, and so forth, and half is invisibly hidden behind the window. So I have to click forth and back all the time, since only then can I place the equation where it is supposed to be, and most of all, only then can I *see* it in completeness. I can imagine much better than changing between the document and the white command line input down all the time. Going down, going up totally to reach the very limited menu, down the whole screen to write, click to see it in the document, click the formula again for modifications that gets me back all down to a command line... . Yes, I can imagine a window that actually re-sizes completely with the formula, an arrow (top left of the window) to place that window in a document, and me typing the equation in that window overlaying the document, as a floating window, not covering the display of the equation. What about marking a certain part of the equation (also not possible now), and using my mouse wheel to adjust the size, e.g.)? What about numbering the equations to the right if so desired; either incremental or taken from the heading of the insertion point? I know, the coders will tell me 'impossible', but then, how to surpass MS Office?
But now I have to stop, otherwise I'll feel like filing some twenty RFE, which will be turned down or left unattended.
Since I am at it: OpenOffice also regressed on SVG, EPS. But when I filed it there, someone acknowledged it within one day and had a patch for SVG out within another 2 days. then I had to migrate to OpenOffice, because I have hundreds of drawings in SVG and EPS for my lectures, and with OpenOffice at least half of those became usable again.
One item I missed in my OP: the worst nightmare: Bibliography.
So overall, LibreOffice has improved very much with respect to convenience of UI, true. But it has since inception never done any significant changes to the non-basics: Equation Editor (already mentioned) and Bibliography. The latter is almost non-existent, while that of MS Office is just great. And the import of professional image formats was a regression.
I know that there are overworked volunteers, and that's not what I argue about. The overall progress to me rather looks like 'bad' governance: An office suite that Dick,Tom and Harry can conveniently use to write a letter to their town-hall. This part is fully achieved. But years without getting any closer to a Writer that helps publishing larger works, like scientific papers. That's why I am not overly convinced.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
And how does it compare to my preferred EnGenius?
Those mentioned don't look like professional stuff; rather like top products for the advanced home user, sorry to say.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks for confirming that something is very wrong with the system!
Thanks for your kind words! (b***s***).
I beg to differ, because I foresee - not actually, but it will come - the day when I take a smartphone with me all the time, and plug it into a dock at home or work, to continue where I have left off.
Currently I am not there, though I own a lenovo ('S') with docks at home and at work, so that I can carry this (still in a backpack) to wherever I go, including holidays, to always have with me what I need and want, with actual relevant data in the cloud.
This suits me totally, except of the size of the current machine and its weight. Once a smartphone is powerful enough (8 GB of RAM, multicore @ 2 GHz, uHDMI - am not a gamer) and allows me to apt-get like my desktop, I'll be the first person to buy it.
When I'll be on the road, in a bus or train, it'll be a normal smartphone, and when docked it will be a normal PC with monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers connected to the dock. And, no, I don't consider clutching any smartphone against my ears when phoning as comfortable, so when docked, a basic free-hands phone application will be my piece of the cake.
Logically, a unified interface would be the DE of choice, adapting to the screen size intelligently, not just scaling up icons to a threatening size like Unity. Not like Plasma 4 with almost nothing visible on smaller screens due to just non-scaling ('Search and Launch'). While I hate the old 'Metro' interface, it goes the first steps into that unified direction: On Windows Phone 8.X it is a usable interface, and it tries to become usable also on a large desktop screen. I can only hope that Plasma 5 will go into that direction, too, and just be much better.
This is not good news. I'm a FOSS person, and love choices. Though I'd have loved to actually see the 'year of Linux on the desktop', and the confusing DE-mess (confusing to the new user, at least) was one of the reasons for it to not happen. The wannabe convert was so glued to the concept of 'the interface is everything' that she couldn't grasp the concept of 'the interface is just another layer'. And that 'learning' of 'yet another interface' was perceived as 'just too much'.
That's the drug dished out by Windows, mostly, that some silly icon on a screen is the application. And the task bar was never a good workbench in Windows in order to understand that you take applications like tools from a toolbox. And you put them back, if you don't need them temporarily.
So wars were fought about Desktops, and rather introvert nerds designed DEs like there was no tomorrow. And while I'm on KDE for many years now, they ought to have been hanged for the early Plasma versions. Likewise those who messed up Gnome. My preferred DE was the Gnome 1.4 of last millennium. It did exactly what I wanted it to do. Gnome 2 got me to KDE, and Plasma to XFCE. And Plasma after 4.5 back to KDE.
How the heck can anyone expect a 'Linux on the desktop' if desktop design decisions are handed over to nerd developers with nothing but time and ideas on their hands? And no governance that stops silly 'rewrites' and 'redrafts' of whole concepts for ever more shiny applets and widgets? The latter is fine, but not in mainstream DEs like Gnome, KDE. The W95 design has been with us for almost 20 years, with minor additions, and those were already perceived as 'too difficult' by many Windows users.
So what we get with TDE is a fall back for which I bet that there is no future. It can't because the only change necessary is the one that was done on Windows, and is currently done with Plasma 5: adopt a DE that can be unified for desktops and small screens. And exactly that is not done on TDE.
In a nutshell: TDE is the desktop (fork) that nobody needs.
Almost everyone commenting here is an idiot practically.
It takes one to spot all, as the saying goes ...
Forget the stupid AVs. They need streets, follow traffic rules, can relatively easy be searched, might even get stuck in a traffic jam at prime time.
A drone with GPS guidance and environment awareness can fly sufficiently close to buildings, too close for flight radar, does not need any street, cannot be searched, only taken down. If equipped with poison or explosives, the drone might not hit the target, and yet will be anything but pleasant.
The only downside is the payload. You can't load her up to kilotons TNT, though, on the other hand, the potential precision is much better, and the payload can be deposited - in average - much closer to the target.
I'm sorry for you, but you did a thorough research without finding the relevant semantics. Otherwise you could not have titled me as 'UMNO propagandist', because what i wrote is exactly the opposite of what UMNO is trying to instill into the population. Namely, that the Malays are the indigenous population. If I had much more time on my hands, I'd find out some academic articles, including by prominent Malaysians, that this is exactly not the case (Malays being there for thousands of years).
Alas, you are also mistaken w.r.t. the immigrants. The first Chinese settlements have been there around 1500 AD, when Malacca was about the centre of trade in South-East-Asia.
Remains your kind suggestion of me being an idiot, because - and I cite - 'this is an American site'. Wow. Your logic is quite remarkable. Because the United States has been around for only 250 years, I am supposed to be an idiot for arguing in longer periods of time?
Or maybe you simply misunderstood the whole matter, since I never questioned anything close to your example of the Romanians. The only thing that I questioned, and I am in the good company of science, is that the Malays were the natives of the Malaysian Peninsula. And i am in that same company, when I state that about 90 % of the Malays have landed in that region as a result of migratory activities, whenever those might have happened.
Even though you are AC, I correct you:
Your assumption is possible, but in reality it is a bunch of oligarchs that hide behind Islam in order to con the simple people, who are, as we have learned in other posts, forced to be Muslims. This is - by the way - expressed in the law of the land.
You are objectively incorrect. I don't have to pull out the resources, everyone can do on her own. There are camps where people who desire to leave the Islamic religion are interned for weeks, and months. They are called 're-education camps' where some Imam tries to convince them of the beauty of the religion.
True, it is not life imprisonment, but against basic western understanding.
Alas, wrong. But you couldn't necessarily know.
The Malays have not been lving there for thousands of years, 90 % are migrants from other places as well, from the overcrowded Malayan Archipelago, driving out the native population ('Orang Asli'), who are in these days more often that not forcibly converted to Islam.
Yes, you fell for the usual official propaganda, which is shown by your second last sentence. That's the official formulation. Don't forget that in 1969 close to 2000 people were slaughtered in a large inter-ethnic unrest. The previous dean of the Institute 'ATMA' (Malay and Islamic Civilisation) at the National University of Malaysia formulated it more correctly: "Malaysia is a country in stable tension".
Insightful? Hmm.
Do you really know the situation in Malaysia, or are you arguing out of some emotional arousal?
The Malaysian constitution prescribes favorable allotment of jobs and university places to the members of the ruling, majority, ethnicity, the Malays. And this is not just in writing but implemented. Malaysian citizens of Chinese or Indian ethic background see it happen that a student with straight 'A's is denied a university education in the public universities while a mediocre Malay student is gladly admitted. Wow! There is even a university with 140000 students exclusively for students of Malay ethnicity. Check UiTM in WikIpedia if in doubt. Malays get monthly allowances for their kids, the others ethic groups don't.
All chancellors of all universities are Malays, almost all deans (with very few exceptions) are Malays due to the constitutional 'preferences'.
I think I can stop here, and I am arguing based on 12 years as university lecturer in said country.
Now the ball is in your court: I don't have much of insight into Israel, maybe you can enlighten me on the situation in Israel, please? Maybe I can learn something from that.
Some mods are trying hard to mod down not on objective reasons, but on political and subjective dis-/agreement. Sad.
Don't take the down-mod too seriously. Probably your last sentence infuriated a proud US citizen.
How interesting, your comparison of Lessig's campaign and Xinhua News. Is it?
Some mods seem to think so, I don't. Since i have no mods points, I have to write that is more of OT.
Lessig's campaign is not without context either.
Enough.
Why AC?
I have created some pages, and found them deleted likewise. No, not about family members or stuff, but as a starting point to collectively collect sparse information about some almost forgotten actors in not almost forgotten movies. Actors that have impressed me one way or another, despite minor roles. Why is it so wrong to start a wiki page on person XYZ who pops up in the credits of a movie as cinematographer or actor, and put in a few lines, as many as I can do, a link to the IMDB entry of the movie, and over. Maybe in a year, or a decade, or a generation, some family member or another fan finds that entry and can make it grow.
With deletion, we have this unique opportunity of information collection removed.
Okay, you love to use cliches until the cows come home.
No, the country can't be 'fixed' by changing one law. And Lessig doesn't say so.
But no amounts of laws can 'fix' a country that is governed by people who could only make it into government by buy-ing into politics of powerful sponsors. Sponsors who expect the elected ones to push for the policies of the 'generous' sponsors.
So make it two steps: First remove the decision of the sponsors on who can become a candidate. Second, get candidates that are determined by the (voter) population alone.
Someone asked 'why modded down'?. Whoever that AC was, let me point out that I agree with that mod by answering your question:
Firstly, all sources have to be laid open. Affiliations included.
Secondly, your post is not quite on topic, because Lessig has never said anything close to 'censoring'. Watch his talk at TED. He wants the result of elections to be a result of the votes alone, like written by the founding fathers. When the idea is, any candidate, irrespective of funding by 132 (watch said talk) individuals can make it, this is no censorship. On the contrary, if 132 (or 144k, watch the talk) decide on the candidate to run, that would be censorship, since the US has rather 144M voters.
I doubt that you consider funding by some party expecting 'returns' after the elections as 'democratic'. Therefore, some system must be put in place to limit, yes, limit, funding in a way that only altruistic campaign donations are possible. If you consider a reduction of corruption as 'censoring', that's your perspective.
Would be nice, but isn't.
Peer-review is a crazy thing, I agree. Too often my own contributions were not understood, or deliberately brought down for offending the reviewers' personal opinions. Too often my own reviews were lousy, or I didn't understand the papers, or brought them down for not agreeing with my opinion.
And yet, the process as such has often resulted in my re-thinking my own papers, improving them, and often my reviews have resulted in papers of others being improved.
Try this in blog format, and 90%+ of a******s don't have a basic idea what the whole thing is about, and those who'd know don't come to view it. No, academic progress is not possible in selfie format, but in collaborative ways, with ever changing contributors.
[why AC?]
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, even as AC.
That's exactly the situation! You can as well see the standing of public U-s in the USA vs the private ones. 2 generations ago the public U-s were often great places of academic activities, and with a high standing (leave out Harvard and a few more). Recently, the funding for the public U-s has gone down, and businesses have bought in. As of 2015 ever more public U-s are on the decline while private ones rise. Naturally. Naturally? Naturally; in case one agrees with academia and tertiary education as just another business area.
Personally, I'm much too old to buy into this crap, though when I talk to younger colleagues, for them all this sickness seems just plain normal. The worst part, at least to me, is the consequence over the long run: when almost all third party funding is done from business-minded people with 'industrial applicability' within less than 3 years, we obtain some serious refinement of existing technologies in the best Confucian sense. But why did China drop off the scientific map centuries ago? Because their inventions, from porcelain to dynamite saw but small refinements, but no larger work, no application beyond a narrow field. In short, effective stagnation. So the Europeans could harvest everything and re-invent it.
Back to the topic in question: Who in our days is given the liberty and the funding to think the thoughts (often enough out of the box or ready applicability) that can lay a foundation over one or two generations into the future?
How long did it take to rotate an image in Writer without copying to Draw, rotate it there, and copy it back!?
It was filed March 17th, 2002 (!!) against StarOffice. It was filed, again, February 17th, 2011, against documentfoundation.org.
It was - drumrollllls - solved on July 2015.
This points to a serious bug in governance.
With pleasure: Nothing. I wrote that the bibliography in MS Word is 'so superior'. ... .
The equation editor of MS Word has its pros and its cons. Should anyone so desire, I could make a detailed comparison, though I think they'd come out pretty close.
What could be improved definitively - and that's what I wrote - is the UI, the see-what-you-get. Because when you open a New Formula, you get a tiny little piece of window somewhere in your document, and then one starts writing, newlines, and so forth, and half is invisibly hidden behind the window. So I have to click forth and back all the time, since only then can I place the equation where it is supposed to be, and most of all, only then can I *see* it in completeness.
I can imagine much better than changing between the document and the white command line input down all the time. Going down, going up totally to reach the very limited menu, down the whole screen to write, click to see it in the document, click the formula again for modifications that gets me back all down to a command line
Yes, I can imagine a window that actually re-sizes completely with the formula, an arrow (top left of the window) to place that window in a document, and me typing the equation in that window overlaying the document, as a floating window, not covering the display of the equation. What about marking a certain part of the equation (also not possible now), and using my mouse wheel to adjust the size, e.g.)? What about numbering the equations to the right if so desired; either incremental or taken from the heading of the insertion point? I know, the coders will tell me 'impossible', but then, how to surpass MS Office?
But now I have to stop, otherwise I'll feel like filing some twenty RFE, which will be turned down or left unattended.
Since I am at it: OpenOffice also regressed on SVG, EPS. But when I filed it there, someone acknowledged it within one day and had a patch for SVG out within another 2 days. then I had to migrate to OpenOffice, because I have hundreds of drawings in SVG and EPS for my lectures, and with OpenOffice at least half of those became usable again.
[Reply to self]
One item I missed in my OP: the worst nightmare: Bibliography.
So overall, LibreOffice has improved very much with respect to convenience of UI, true.
But it has since inception never done any significant changes to the non-basics: Equation Editor (already mentioned) and Bibliography. The latter is almost non-existent, while that of MS Office is just great. And the import of professional image formats was a regression.
I know that there are overworked volunteers, and that's not what I argue about. The overall progress to me rather looks like 'bad' governance: An office suite that Dick,Tom and Harry can conveniently use to write a letter to their town-hall. This part is fully achieved. But years without getting any closer to a Writer that helps publishing larger works, like scientific papers. That's why I am not overly convinced.
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.
have something useful to contribute. And not mess up whole eco-systems. ;-)
Nightvision?