Importance of LibreOffice [LWN.net]

Importance of LibreOffice

Posted Feb 8, 2013 4:38 UTC (Fri) by amosbatto (guest, #52567)
Parent article: LibreOffice 4.0 released

I have long thought that the poor office suites available in Linux have prevented many people from switching to Linux. I first installed Linux in 1999, but I didn't switch to Linux as my full time operating system until 2006 because I couldn't give up WordPerfect. Although I have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice almost exclusively since 2006, I still think that WordPerfect is better than LO Writer, Excel is better than LO Calc and PowerPoint is better than LO Impress. If I didn't firmly believe in the ideology of free software, I would use a proprietary office suite.

For me, the development of LibreOffice is the *one* thing in the world of software that substantially improves my life. New features in the FireFox, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, GIMP, etc., don't have much impact on me, because those pieces of software already do everything that I need. The only other software development that truly impacts my life are the drivers in the Linux kernel that support new hardware.

For that reason I'm really grateful to all the people who are donating their time to improve LibreOffice. I'm really hoping that all the code refactoring and the growth of a community around LibreOffice will make it easier for LibreOffice to eventually catch up to the proprietary suites.

The new regular expression search engine and the better quality export of charts in Calc are new features that I will use in LibreOffice 4.0, but I find it so frustrating that there aren't more new features. The changes being made to the code (such as the use of Glade to design more flexible dialog boxes and PO files to handle translations) look very promising. I keep hoping that these types of behind-the-scenes changes will make it easier to develop LibreOffice in the future, so it can eventually equal and surpass the proprietary suites. I'm hoping that all those behind-the-scenes changes will make it possible to eventually use LibreOffice in web pages and mobile phones.

So I keep hoping. I have been disappointed and frustrated for so long with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, but I keep hoping.

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Importance of LibreOffice

Posted Feb 11, 2013 16:50 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Yeah, I bought that (used it to write the IPChains Quick Reference). I think it's more correct to say that slower-than-snot, seriously crashy word processor that looked a lot like WordPerfect was available on Linux.

But, it you switched platforms to use it seriously, you'd switch back before the end of your first day. It was that bad.

Importance of LibreOffice

Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:37 UTC (Mon) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

My wife did a couple of translations with wp for Linux, but she was always peeved that it was a stupid X11 application, instead of the really nice terminal wp client that was around on other unices.

Because, as you said, it was crashy as hell. Just not as crashy as staroffice was back then, or max-something, or weird like angoss smartware.

Importance of LibreOffice

Posted Feb 12, 2013 15:26 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>slower-than-snot, seriously crashy word processor that looked a lot like WordPerfect

Oh dear; well that would explain it alright.

That can't have made a good impression of general application quality on people trying Linux for the first time :(.

Importance of LibreOffice

Posted Feb 12, 2013 15:29 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

To be fair,the first gui versions of WordPerfect for Dos and Windows were also very slow, extremely crash-prone and likely to corrupt your data. My wife wrote a book on the first Windows version of WordPerfect and used 5.1 for DOS for that.

Importance of LibreOffice

Posted Feb 13, 2013 18:53 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

Having used them (WP5.0 for SCO, WP5.1 for DOS, WP6.0 and WP6.1 for Windows, and supported WP5.1 and WP5.2 for Windows) my feeling was that ALL of them were rock solid ... UNLESS

You made the mistake of letting MS sabotage them. 5.1 and 5.2 for Windows were fine. Just a bit clunky, and I never had any desire to change from 5.1 for DOS.

6.0Win was great provided you ran it on Windows 3.1. Problem is, we were just introducing networking at the time, and MS slipped a bomb into the TCP/IP stack that killed it. It took 6.1 to fix all the "bugs" MS introduced.

And then, of course, MS sabotaged that with Office 95. If you installed 6.1 on top of Office 95 everything was fine. If, however, you installed Office over 95, well, ... the only way I ever found to fix the mess and get WP working again was "format c:".

Cheers,
Wol