LWN: Comments on "Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice"

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

mathstuf — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:57:46 +0000

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…).

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

jem — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 06:16:14 +0000

>...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

DimeCadmium — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 17:19:04 +0000

I would love to know what you've run into that you can do in Excel/Calc but not Sheets. My experience has been much the opposite, Sheets surpassing Calc. To be fair we do make use of "Apps Script" in a couple places where Excel might be able to do it more natively (data sources and what not).

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

DimeCadmium — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 17:14:34 +0000

> 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

DimeCadmium — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 17:08:30 +0000

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

seyman — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 19:08:49 +0000

I'm pretty sure that you can enable notifications on release-monitoring.org .

For deployment, you can either run your own yum repo (it's really not that hard) or use ansible/puppet/whatever-is-hot-this-week to automate it.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

farnz — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 18:57:30 +0000

It's surprisingly simple to build a yum/dnf repo, too - just put all the RPMs under a single directory tree (call that tree $REPO_ROOT) and run "createrepo $REPO_ROOT". All the metadata you need for a yum/dnf repo is then generated for you, and you can serve the repo directory over HTTPS to users.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

jcpunk — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 16:05:18 +0000

I'd be fine with using the upstream RPMs if they had a yum repo I could pull from.

It doesn't really scale for me to check the website, compare the versions, download the package, scp it to a bunch of hosts, then dnf update across all my workstations.

Firefox PIE

DemiMarie — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 21:28:15 +0000

Please report this as a bug on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org or to Mozilla’s security team.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

luya — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 20:12:17 +0000

Reading the comments, it is very surprising very few mentions that Libre Office supports collaboration via Google Docs and possibly Microsoft 365 through remote functionality.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

rahulsundaram — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 19:07:07 +0000

>LibreOffice has worked on Microsoft compatibility for decades and now they are overtaken by a new project?

I can't speak to the merits of the compatibility claims but WPS Office is not remotely close to a new project. It has been for 35 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

DOT — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:19:28 +0000

If true, do you have an idea how that could have happened? LibreOffice has worked on Microsoft compatibility for decades and now they are overtaken by a new project?

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

madhatter — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:12:23 +0000

Not only is this one of the most gracious submissions to this thread, it's also one that rings truest with me.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

kpfleming — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:54:19 +0000

Unfortunately that's only true in product development teams; there were quite a few people with 'software engineer' titles included in the April layoffs... just not in teams that were as noticeable.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

koh — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 21:44:54 +0000

How insightful, thanks!

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

smurf — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 14:16:44 +0000

No it has not.

Not talking about the details here seems prurient.

Collabora picking up some of the slack ...

paulj — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 12:53:58 +0000

A self-hosted, web version of (to some extent) the LibreOffice code capabilities would be an amazing contribution to the Free Software world. Thanks v much for working on this. Hope you get lots of customers to help drive it forward. Thanks!

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

paulj — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 12:51:06 +0000

I'm assuming that pretty much the entire "Not Microsoft Office" business-app world still depends on Caolan's work? I.e., his work on file format support? I /guess/ that libwv and such is responsible for Google Docs and others ability to interop with MS Office.

Hell, even *Microsoft* had to go to Caolan to find out how some of their own, older, Word formats worked.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

rahulsundaram — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 12:11:03 +0000

> Except that this is has zero impact on Debian users, as far as they are concerned the merge is done.

That didn't seem to be the case reading https://lwn.net/Articles/890219/. Has the situation changed since then?

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

ballombe — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:28:20 +0000

Except that this is has zero impact on Debian users, as far as they are concerned the merge is done.
%ls -l /*(@)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 28 nov. 2020 /bin -> usr/bin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 28 nov. 2020 /lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 28 nov. 2020 /lib32 -> usr/lib32
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 28 nov. 2020 /lib64 -> usr/lib64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 28 nov. 2020 /libx32 -> usr/libx32
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 28 nov. 2020 /sbin -> usr/sbin

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

timrichardson — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:19:45 +0000

You can get a .deb or .rpm of an Office suite which is basically 100% compatible with MS Office as it a clone.
But it is not open source, although neither is MS Office: WPS Office. It is so accurate that I use it for MS Word mail-merge templates that must be mm precise, and which are rendered by Microsoft binaries. Anyone who complains about lack of MS Office file compatibility on Linux has not used WPS Office.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

hailfinger — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 21:25:09 +0000

As a software developer, I am thankful for packagers.

I can focus on providing software in source form which can be compiled reasonably easy on the most common platforms. Packagers take care of all the idiosyncrasies or their platform of choice and I can integrate most of that work into the next release, making life easier for me (no need to find out how to handle platform/distro X), for the packagers (most/all of their changes integrated) and for users (software will be installable from their repo of choice and/or compile out of the box on their target platform).

As a user, I am also thankful if software comes in a format native to the distribution and from a repository I trust.

I have seen enough developer-created run-anywhere packages with unfixed security issues in vendored libraries (after all, why would the developer want to regenerate the package if the main software is unchanged), horrible file system access integration (no access to /tmp, no access to custom locations outside $HOME) and bloated storage requirements (vendoring of already installed libraries consumes space). Plus, distributions usually test updates from one software version to another and old versions won't disappear on a whim.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

bartoc — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:26:54 +0000

Most of this work still goes on in flatpak, it just happens in the context of portals and maintaining the freedesktop runtime. The app/runtime separation is that the app contains all the stuff you could statically link if you really wanted to, and the runtime contains the bits that really need to be system libraries, or are so stable you may as well maintain them as system libraries and share them between apps.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

zdzichu — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:18:51 +0000

The problem is that RH (as a company) withdrawing their support (manhours) could have impact on Fedora distribution. Which ships 7.5.3.2, by the way.
New maintainers for LO in Fedora seem to have appeared, so the problem did not materialize.
Hardly anyone cares about LO in RHEL (as a distribution).

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

ctg — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 16:20:30 +0000

I'm puzzled by this. We stopped using the "redhat" packages getting on for a decade ago. They're usually a few years behind upstream: any value added by the packaging doesn't compensate for the missing features, and the fact that the RH packages are unsupported as far as upstream is concerned (e.g. security fixes).

I would be surprised if any serious LO users weren't using the upstream RPMs (or other package formats) - either community edition, or, if really serious, the business supported ones).

RHEL 9, Centos 9, Alma 9 has LO 7.1 This was released in Feb 21. 7.5 and 7.4 are the currently supported versions. 7.4 is the bugfix only "stable" version - released in June 22. 7.6 is due for release in August, at which point 7.4 will be unsupported, while RHEL will still be on 7.1

Dropping out of date packages seems sensible to me.

(The only niggle I have with the LO packages is that they aren't signed, but they've been reliable and integrated enough into the "redhat" environment that I'd completely forgotten that RH have their own packaged versions until this announcement).

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Wol — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 15:32:45 +0000

> And that this didn't happen using WordPerfect, only Word.

> (Incidentally, it's been said that one of the main motivators for Windows was to make WordPerfect's compatibility with vast numbers of printers irrelevant..)

As someone who ended up writing my then company's WP printer drivers, I can assure you this didn't come "out of the box". But the thing is, not only was it possible, but it wasn't that difficult.

Trying to fix printer issues today, on the other hand ...

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Wol — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 15:29:46 +0000

> The assumption that developers are good at packaging - or that they fully understand their software and its interaction with other components - is simply wrong.

As somebody who has written a makefile (for a very simple piece of software, and assuming nothing more than a modern linux system) I can only concur.

I wrote it and it worked fine on my gentoo system. Then somebody tried to run it on - Red Hat I believe - and it fell over in a heap.

Systemd may have brought distros closer together, but there's still plenty of landmines for unwary developers cum packagers.

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Wol — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 15:27:00 +0000

> > Word processing documents can be good for editing because they give you a good idea approximately what the final product will look like, but they are not designed to precisely set the exact position of every element on the page.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a word processing document looks the same when printed as it does on screen (modulo resolution).

If it was just that they weren't that precise, I wouldn't mind. It's that with Word "not that precise" means "add another word to your paragraph and your graphics just vanish".

The Word paradigm is "if you can't see it, you can't do it". If Word hides something, it's the devil's own job to unhide it.

That's why WordPerfect fanatics are WordPerfect fanatics. Over there - markup is a first-class citizen. Bar Corel's screw-up rewriting v9 from scratch (I *hope* they've fixed the worst of the mess), stuff just can't disappear because if you go into the markup window, stuff will be precisely where you left it, and double-clicking the markup brings up the dialog box so you can edit it.

Cheers,
Wol

upstream first

joib — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 13:45:51 +0000

> And, in the general case, it's not even that I don't trust them *now*. It's that if we all end up with "stub" distros whose only purpose is to run "vendor" supplied flatpaks, the vendor's incentive to start misbehaving will become irresistible as time passes.

It's not like if a distro decides to trust upstream to provide software X via flathub (or whatever it's called) then that decision is set in stone for all eternity. Distros could very well adopt a "trust but verify" attitude, and if upstream starts to misbehave the distro can strip out the dirty bits and package it themselves (be it in rpm's/deb's, a distro-maintained flathub instance, or whatever, doesn't per se matter for this discussion).

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

pizza — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 13:26:18 +0000

In both cases the it was the same paper size, and the document margins were well within the printers' minimum margins.

And that this didn't happen using WordPerfect, only Word.

(Incidentally, it's been said that one of the main motivators for Windows was to make WordPerfect's compatibility with vast numbers of printers irrelevant..)

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

mgedmin — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 11:59:55 +0000

> I remember when selecting a different *printer* on the same PC caused formatting to shift slightly. For the same (ie US Letter) paper sizes.

I wonder if it's because the page margins were too small for some of the printers and got automatically adjusted for that particular print job, causing a reflow of the layout?

upstream first

mikebenden — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 11:55:29 +0000

Because they suck slightly less than the alternative, at least for now?

Take Firefox, for example (another program where "flatpak" has been insistently mentioned here and elsewhere :)

And, in the general case, it's not even that I don't trust them *now*. It's that if we all end up with "stub" distros whose only purpose is to run "vendor" supplied flatpaks, the vendor's incentive to start misbehaving will become irresistible as time passes.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

MarcB — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:39:19 +0000

Also neat: https://www.reddit.com/r/flatpak/comments/1026p0l/mouse_c...

The cursor disappears, because the flatpaked application is not allowed to access the icons at certain locations.

This is exactly the type of issue developers are notoriously bad at, but which integrators are constantly dealing with.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

cyperpunks — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:33:03 +0000

Good news, thanks!

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

rahulsundaram — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:38:47 +0000

>That's great, why not maintain those inside Fedora and avoid all this drama?

If you read the thread, within a short time, multiple people have stepped up to maintain it within Fedora.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

eru — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:35:35 +0000

Yes. I'm also wondering what the hoopla is all about. In the past when using CentOS I always installed the OpenOffice and later LibreOffice RPM:s from the upstream to get a non-ancient version.
Now that I have been mostly using Fedora and Mint, the bundled one has been new enough, a convenience, but i would keep using LibreOffice also it it meant again the upstream RPM:s, no fuss.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

MarcB — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:13:26 +0000

Indeed. 90% works, but then you do something that was not expected and things break badly.

Nice example: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/8876 (the issue is generic to GVFS)

This issue is apparently known in one form or another since 2019. It happens for Flatpak and Snap. The exact root cause likely varies between different version of GVFS.
Depending on your typical usage, you will never encounter this issue. But in my case, it is a showstopper.

The AppImage version works, but it is not using GNOME file dialogs. The only version that works perfectly, is the .deb package.

I am absolutely not impressed with upstream packaged software, but also not surprised: development and integration are very different things and require very different skill sets. The assumption that developers are good at packaging - or that they fully understand their software and its interaction with other components - is simply wrong.

upstream first

NAR — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:09:10 +0000

If you don't trust upstream, why use their software in the first place?

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

anselm — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:28:00 +0000

Word processing documents can be good for editing because they give you a good idea approximately what the final product will look like, but they are not designed to precisely set the exact position of every element on the page.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a word processing document looks the same when printed as it does on screen (modulo resolution). Certainly for word processors that purport to implement “what you see is what you get”. AFAIR, the “slight differences” one would have to deal with in Word included page breaks ending up in different places depending on which printer one was using, but they may have fixed that now.

Having said that, I've been using LaTeX for the last 35 years or so, so I'm used to different standards as far as presentation is concerned.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

cyperpunks — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 06:38:02 +0000

That's great, why not maintain those inside Fedora and avoid all this drama?