Red Hat is Dropping Its Support for LibreOffice - Slashdot

Red Hat is Dropping Its Support for LibreOffice

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• 1 hidden comment

• Re:

  I've never tried Collabora, but I definitely agree that the office suite has moved to the cloud.

  One of the weird things about modern computing is it's still weirdly hard to share files, both to 3rd parties but even among your own devices. This is a huge issue for office apps where communication is kinda the point.

  With a browser-based office app I don't need to worry about multiple versions floating around, wanting to work on it but not having it on the right device, wondering the exact version I attached in

  • Re:

    I've never tried Collabora, but I definitely agree that the office suite has moved to the cloud
    
    Cool, so when internet access isn't available for some reason or another, a bunch of work comes to a standstill. Haven't the PHBs learned the fragility of depending on the cloud by now? Apparently not

    • Re: Is there a useful alternative?

      I have a job to do. You seem to be letting the tail wag the dog

    • Re:

      Consider the various events, in rough order of likeliness.

      a) A power outage: Cloud or no cloud you aren't working (except that your laptop has battery power)
      b) An Internet outage: You can't work on the doc for now, but people can usually find other useful things to do. And even if you were working locally a lot of people still need the internet for various reasons.
      c) A failure of your local network: Can probably still use the cloud, but depending on your local IT your might not be able to work.
      d) A serious

      • Re: Is there a useful alternative?

        But your data is being scraped to the nth degree, and youâ(TM)d better make sure your subscription never fails to be processed. And the cloud providers donâ(TM)t just ramp up the price ever so subtly.

        • Re:

          A legit concern, though somewhat abstract and hard to quantify any harm from a business perspective.

          Not that hard, and cloud service operators aren't stupid, if your sub fails to be processed they'll give you tons of warnings and if it does cease they'll reactivate very quickly.

          Someone rooting you and stealing the main credentials for the service, now that is a more serious concern.

          A little, sure. But massive price increases would kill their subscriber base, so they're not really motivated to.

          And you face t

  • Re:

    ^^^^THIS

    After 40 fuckin' years you'd think they'd have this shit down by now, but nooooooo. I'm not saying it's easy, but they really should have had figured this out by now.

    Open as DOCX, then convert to ODF, then save as PDF, then FML, then look at the utter fucking mess it's made, then give up and go home early because this shit is infuriating. Thank god I'll be retiring in 20 short years!

    • One too many steps

      There's your problem: don't convert it to FML. The warning's right there in the name.

  • Re:

    This is one area that the walled garden approach has some advantages. Apple has completely nailed this. It's trivial--automatic even--to share files between desktop, laptop, iphone, ipad, etc. Ditto sharing to other mac users (Airdrop / iCloud sharing).

• Re:

  Yeah, I have LO installed on my Fedora desktops, but I probably use it less than once a year. For work, it's all Google ($LASTJOB was Google and then switched to O365).

  I've been using Fedora for my desktop since the project started, used Red Hat Linux before that back to about RHL 4, and Slackware and SLS before that. I remember buying a copy of WordPerfect for Linux (I liked WP5.1 on DOS back in the day). But documents and spreadsheets just aren't things I deal with on even a semi-regular basis for a long

  • Re:

    So you might remember StarOffice? Which became LibreOffice... StarOffice was practically unuseable. A monolithic Java application which would consume any RAM available! Imagine trying to have a word processing document AND a spreadsheet open at the same time!

    • Re:

      Well technically, StarOffice begat OpenOffice.org, which then begat LibreOffice.:)

      But yeah, I think I never successfully ran StarOffice. Most big Java things I've had to deal with tend to think Java is their OS and run everything in one process with a million threads (and when just one thread craps out, you have to restart the entire process). And none of those things were cross-platform, they just ran on Linux, so no excuse for not using a better design.

      • Re:

        Most of Star Office was C/C++. Only some long-gone plugins used Java. Sun tried to use Star Office as a showcase Java app for odd reasons.

    • Re:

      You are misremembering. StarOffice was C++ and it was usable. I used to use StarOffice 4.2 on OS/2 back in the day.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:

      StarOffice was written in Java? When did that happen? Obviously it wasn't that way originally - StarWriter predates the birth of Java by 10 years, and had already added Calc, Base, Draw, Image and Chart before Java's first release.

      Of course, later versions did *use* Java, but my understanding was that was simply the application scripting language - much like Visual Basic for Applications with Microsoft Office. Though I do feel like later versions of Base might have required it.

    • Re:

      I used Star Office 5 back on Red Hat 5.2. It worked quite well and was very usable at this point. Star Office was never written in Java. It was C++. It embedded Java to do filtering for document formats, so it did pull in a lot of resources. But Java was, if I recall, optional.

• • Re:

    Its IBM. The only applicants were probably over 35 and deemed unsuitable.

    • Re:

      the penetration of ms office is hard to ignore in the enterprise world who will leave on disk os installation like office did. also, exchanging file types between office apps has never quite been enterprise level safe.

  • Re:

    >despite two iso standards for office formats.
    To be fair, only one of those has any compliant implementations, and those (mostly) work pretty well amongst each other. Microsoft Office files are NOT compliant with the published specification, and compliant files will often not open correctly.

• Google docs is less cabable than MS Word 5 from 30 years ago. You can't even get proper image captions or custom styles without installing a buggy plugin from an unknown random author. I'm amazed that companies think they can replace a full office suite with a half baked browser app. Maybe office 365 is better.

  • I'm amazed that companies think they can replace a full office suite with a half baked browser app.

    The graphic artists need real DTP applications. Some of the people in legal need a very precise word processor. Whoever makes the documentation will need specialized software of some kind. There are other niche cases, but most people don't have any need to be that finicky. The goal is to transmit information effectively. Everyone doesn't have to be a damned artist about it, that's frankly a waste of time unless the material is going to be seen by huge numbers of people. And if it is, then it can be cleaned up by someone who does it all the time, and is good at it. Redhat probably did a survey (or just looked at usage, do they have something like popcon by default?) and figured out they would not lose any significant sales if they dropped LO.

  • Re:

    Google docs is less cabable than MS Word 5 from 30 years ago.

    Have you tried Zoho Docs? It's at least as capable as recent version of Microsoft Word.

  • Re:

    Not just think. They do. Actual companies use Google docs daily and it works for them. Sure if you do a feature comparison the "new" kid on the block will always be lacking features that the incumbents had sometimes years earlier, but then Google's development is largely data driven. It could very well be that Google isn't catering to people who need to put in image captions, and instead delivering other features users use.

    What's the purpose of an image caption by the way? I just looked up how that's done i

    • Re: Is there a useful alternative?

      Sure, you can put tables all over your document to get "image captions" in the same way you can layout your HTML with tables instead of CSS. The world has moved on, but if you're happy with yesterday's tech then more power to you.
      Also Word image captions can be cross-referenced. So if you ever need to put "refer to Figure 4", Figure 4 is a cross reference that will automatically update if you insert another image and it becomes Figure 5. Very useful for technical docs, user manuals etc.

  • Re:

    It's the 80/20 rule. Most people never use more than 20% of the functionality of MS Word. For them, Google Docs is just fine.

    • Re:

      And for most people, if you delve beyond that 20% there's a more appropriate tool (desktop publishing, HATs, LaTeX, etc.).

• Re:

  Early in its development, Libre Office was "the free thing you used if you couldn't afford MS Office." Now that it has become clearly easier to use than even the standalone versions of MS Office, let alone the subscription monstrosity, dropping it is going to be bad for any Linux distro that pulls this stunt.

  • Re:

    There's a FlatPak. Just use that.

  • Re:

    Pretty much went full time LibreOffice for personal projects, and quite a few work ones as well, when I moved to MacOS a couple of years ago. Charting still isn't great, for straight ahead word processing and spreadsheet work, I've never had an issue.

• Certainly the future of office-style apps---open source or not---is in the browser.

  Which is something various groups have been building on top of LibreOffice [libreoffice.org]. I'm confuzzled really for two reasons.

  The first is projects like the above.

  The second is that LibreOffice is often used headless on servers to do things like convert spreadsheets into images and PDFs. It's not a mainstream use, but it's common enough that the devs actually have a --headless flag that can be passed into it, and it is used all over because of the awkwardness in general of doing conversions of data in Office formats.

  I think RedHat are making a mistake doing this, even if it's been "done to death" or whatever, but unfortunately the current consensus in the GNU/Linux world is "If only 2-3% of people use something, it can't be worth having" - while forgetting that when you remove 50 features 2-3% of people, you're now removing seriously large numbers of users.

  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    You're missing what's really going on here. RedHat is trying to push the entire Linux world onto FlatPak so they control the ecosystem (like what Canonical is doing with Snap). This is their way of saying, "Get the FlatPak."

    RPMs are going to be only for CLI applications going forward, while all GUI applications will be FlatPak.

• The future is not now

  I cannot speak to how Red Hat customers use productivity applications, but I don't believe that browser-based productivity applications are ready to take the place of desktop software.

  Google Sheets is undeniably handy for sharing a simple table of data, but it's no equivalent to LibreOffice Calc.I could try to list all the features missing, but there's a more important point. Google has a long history of implementing useful tools or features and then suddenly dropping them.

  I only use Google to share simp

  • Re:

    That is the issue the paying red hat customers are places like animation studios that are doing specialized work and not using office software . No one buys RHEL and then just does normal office work on it.

  • Re:

    A thing to remember with Google anything is that it may be sent to the Island of Misfit Toys at any time without recourse.

• Re:

  >Certainly the future of office-style apps---open source or not---is in the browser

  Man, fuck that. I ain't doin it.

• Re:

  If the "office suite" has moved to the cloud, that's going to be a problem in multiple industries, particularly any work that not only needs to be secure, but needs to be able to "prove" it was secure.

  Can a lawyer use an online tool to create, manage and record sensitive client data? Is that the best service a lawyer can provide, where the sensitive data is put in the hands of cloud providers who may or may not be doing their security properly?

  If an investigator investigating a crime, or a witness in a tria

• Re:

  I haven't seen Office 365 or know if there's a way to self-host it, but I did use Google Docs at my 2020-2021 job and it's very hard to believe that it's sufficient for most businesses. None of their word processing docs or spreadsheets have contain confidential information?

  Do you use it for some thing, but then have a local tools for some types of data? And Yog-Sothoth help you if they ever need to be combined or otherwise integrated.

  If the boss doesn't care, I don't care. But if I were the boss, I would b

• RHEL will drop desktop RPMs for Flatpaks

  Red Hat has always shipped crippled RPMs for desktop apps because of patent laws. Multimedia, web browsing, document authoring and other common workflows have always been problematic on RHEL and needed unofficial community repos to pick up the slack. Flatpak will kill two birds with one stone by shifting responsibility for all the end-user desktop apps away from corporate hands, while providing reasonable security guarantees thanks to sandboxing and independent reproducible build verification. Red Hat Legal

• Re:

  From experience, Office 365 in the browser is not yet ready for wide spread use. Despite already being in wide spread use.