Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 3, 2023 18:44 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice by jzb
Parent article: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Thanks for this comment. I am in a field (science) where we rarely if ever have to deal with excel macros, and I have only used them for, eg, averaging scores in a row, which libreoffice (or google sheets) can handle perfectly well. And serious text documents are in latex.

But "everything online all the time" makes me uncomfortable. I like to work on my laptop without internet access whether it is latex+emacs or libreoffice. And not everyone is actually online all the time. Plus, not every document or project is collaborative. In my case, most perhaps aren't, and even if they are, it is just easier if one person does the first 90% and then shares and the rest do the remaining 90%.

But then, I see younger people not having local tex/latex installations at all and relying on overleaf, so I'm getting old I guess

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 1:19 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

There is some support for editing Google Docs offline: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?hl=en&...
Only works in Chromium-derived browsers, which is bad.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 7:16 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (17 responses)

> Plus, not every document or project is collaborative. In my case, most perhaps aren't, and even if they are, it is just easier if one person does the first 90% and then shares and the rest do the remaining 90%.

And GDocs has no concept of saving. If you go into a document, and accidentally change something, how do you abandon the changes? If you want to experiment, with no intention of keeping your experiment, how do you do that?

There's probably an answer, but I don't know it ...

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 7:33 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (16 responses)

There is a version history (clock icon on top right), but obviously it doesn't capture every key-stroke, it's fairly coarsegrained. There is also a "name current version" in the file menu, which I imagine checkpoints the current state so you can return to it later, and is the closest thing to "saving", but I haven't tried it.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 11:57 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (15 responses)

> There is a version history ...

Which is exactly the problem - IT'S THE WRONG MINDSET.

If I open a document, and want to leave it IN THE SAME STATE I FOUND IT, GDocs is just plain completely the wrong approach. I don't want to leave *any* history behind, so I don't give a monkeys whether it's coarse- or fine-grained, its mere presence is the problem.

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 12:05 UTC (Sun) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link]

Seriously, STOP SHOUTING

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 15:48 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (9 responses)

File -> Version History -> Name current version

Having to explicitly "save" regularly was incredibly dangerous, I'm glad no software requires that any more.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 15:53 UTC (Sun) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (8 responses)

>Having to explicitly "save" regularly was incredibly dangerous

Why?

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 19:53 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (7 responses)

Because you forget to do so at crucial times, of course.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 20:45 UTC (Sun) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (6 responses)

Never happened to me.
In contrast, autosync/save not working happens all the time.
Bad network connection and boom almost silently failing sync. Happens all the time. This is very annoying.
I would rather click 'save' and get a sane network error message than having a tiny error symbol somewhere and realizing days after the fact that it didn't sync to the network.
Autosave and autosync are just stupid.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 21:35 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

> Never happened to me.

Too bad this type of software is now optimized for normal people, not for exceptional people like you.

> In contrast, autosync/save not working happens all the time.

Never happened to me :-)

> Bad network connection and boom almost silently failing sync

First, this is obviously not a problem for local auto save.

Network save should obviously happen in the background and able to cope with network issues, not interrupting anything else. It's not rocket science and usually done right. If not done right then it's an implementation bug, not a design issue.

(Explicit network save does not work either when there is no network)

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 5, 2023 3:15 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually all of this is a pointless discussion

autosync doesn't hurt; if you don't like it, ignore it
a named version gives you a snapshot of a file at a certain point, same as saving it would do, except you can have multiple historical named snapshots, while saving overwrites your old versions
and you can download a local copy whenever you want

I think the only real issue with google docs is the requirement to be online most of the time. If you are typing when offline, and are unable to get online before your laptop battery dies, you are likely to lose work.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 5, 2023 4:16 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, very nice that something like this now works, given a multi-MBit/sec network link – and some hefty CPUs in some data center, which y'all finance by staring at ads and/or giving up your privacy and/or living off other people who do that.

I'm very happy to live in a world in which distros exist whose target users explicitly include people who don't have the former and/or don't want to do the latter.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 5, 2023 4:41 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

So the discussion was already mixing up auto-save with cloud storage. They interact with each other yet they're different topics.

Thanks for adding another, third, unrelated and non-technical topic: who pays for the cloud and how.

PS: Google Workspace and Office365 are primarily targeted at businesses. None involves any advertisement in that case.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 22:03 UTC (Sun) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> Bad network connection and boom almost silently failing sync. Happens all the time. This is very annoying.

Google Docs (to take an example pertinent to the conversation at large) does not fail silently when it gets a network error while trying to autosave your document.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Aug 14, 2023 17:14 UTC (Mon) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243) [Link]

> Never happened to me.

Yeah. Sure. Regardless of the veracity of the statement

> In contrast, autosync/save not working happens all the time.

Never happened to me. (With Google Docs, excepting the case it can't control of your Internet going out)

> Bad network connection and boom almost silently failing sync. Happens all the time. This is very annoying.

Bad network connection happens to you all the time? I'm sorry. Anyway, there's a solution for that (if you use it in Chrome), it'll keep saving locally and then sync when your connection is back. Even outside of Chrome, all you have to do is leave it open til your connection comes back. And what? Silent? You don't notice when your connection goes out?

> I would rather click 'save' and get a sane network error message than having a tiny error symbol somewhere and realizing days after the fact that it didn't sync to the network.

How is having to remember to click save so much easier than having to remember to check the status that it continually prints (in normal-sized text right by the title of the document)? Oh and then if you *still* try to close it without a successful save, it'll pop up a notification explicitly telling you that if you leave now your changes may not be saved!

> Autosave and autosync are just stupid.

I would say something else in this situation is stupid.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2023 17:19 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

There are two ways of doing that:

1. Change the /edit at the end of the URL to /preview.
2. Click the dropdown at the top right of the page (that says "Editing") and change it to "Viewing."

In most cases, option (2) is more user-friendly, but option (1) is more idiot-proof (because it gets rid of the dropdown altogether). If the system gets overloaded with too many people viewing the same document at the same time, it may force you into option (1).

(Disclaimer: I work for Google and use Docs regularly, but I don't work on Docs.)

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Aug 14, 2023 17:08 UTC (Mon) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243) [Link] (2 responses)

If you open a document, and want to leave it in the same state you found it, then why would you edit it? :)

In all seriousness I generally make a copy first (it's just a couple of clicks!) and then go play around with that.

The version history works exceedingly well for this case though as you can just go revert to the last version that wasn't you/today. It is a bit out of the way, but on the other hand, auto-saving means you don't ever lose all that work that you *did* want to save, and version history means that you can recover even when someone accidentally replaces the whole contents of the file...

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Aug 16, 2023 6:16 UTC (Wed) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

>...then why would you edit it?

Editing can happen in surprising ways. At work we have a web-based phone book, which is essentially a spreadsheet. It is sorted by surname. I wanted to find a person I knew was situated at a certain location, so I clicked the "Location" header to sort the list by location to group all persons at the location. Totally unexpected to me I had now "edited" the phone book, so that anybody opening the document would see the list in an unexpected order, with "last editor" showing my name in plain sight at the crime scene.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Aug 16, 2023 14:57 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Yes, this is quite annoying in Google Docs. One person doing some lookups with filters messes with everyone's view of the thing. Duplicating a sheet can help, but copying the doc just triggers the "which one is the most recent?" problem of ye old days. Not to mention that searching Drive is a nightmare at times (e.g., I can't find docs I know have been shared with me but not opened via the invite link…).