
LibreOffice 6.0 is coming - rbanffy
https://medium.com/@fossmec/libreoffice-6-0-is-coming-8d7a66b83973
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JohnTHaller
> LibreOffice is considered to be more actively developed than OpenOffice

This is such an understatement that it borders on the absurd. OpenOffice is
mostly abandoned and has had issues even marshaling the resources to get
security fixes out as shown by a previous exploit that took 6 months for a
patch. A quick glance at the source trees shows LibreOffice has somewhere
between 40x and 100x the activity as OpenOffice.

The "pulse" for the last 30 days:

OpenOffice: Excluding merges, 3 authors have pushed 14 commits to trunk and 14
commits to all branches. On trunk, 42 files have changed and there have been
207 additions and 240 deletions.

LibreOffice: Excluding merges, 97 authors have pushed 1,509 commits to master
and 2,042 commits to all branches. On master, 5,583 files have changed and
there have been 60,123 additions and 519,150 deletions.

~~~
lima
Serious question: why didn't they merge their efforts?

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Elv13
Apache OpenOffice devs consider themselves to be at war with LO (but that's
fantasy, the project is dead, only its bureaucracy survives). One is copyleft
and the other copyright. One is owned by Apache while the other is the result
of the cooperation of many entities.

OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/Oracle_OOo/IBM_Symphony/Apache-OO have probably more
users (despite being dead) because of brand recognition. Keeping these users
hostage until none remains is the biggest FU they can do to the document
foundation to have forked, so they did.

edit: Added the other brands OOo is known by

~~~
catach
> _because of brand recognition._

I assume long-term corporate support contracts play a large part, too.

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Elv13
I don't think so. When LO forked, Oracle disbanded the whole OOo team (AFAIK).
When they did, IBM was furious and that ended up causing the move to Apache.
In return, IBM merged their commercial fork into Apache OO to save the
project.

But then something unexpected happened, LO rebased thousand of commits (a huge
effort) _on top_ of the IBM code dump. That allowed them to resolve copyright
issues. But it also killed IBM attempt to revive OpenOffice. I think most
support contracts went to SuSE(?) or Collabora, the entities that actually
make money from those contracts as a business model instead of sponsoring OOo
to save themselves money on MS Office licenses.

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chris_wot
It’s more than that though. There are countless improvements, but the _option_
of a more ribbon-like interface is more polished than its ever been, and in
many ways more usable than the Office Ribbon. And I do emphasise that’s an
option - we retain the old UI and will always do so for users. We haven’t
forced a radical change on them because we actually value our power users.

Aside from way better compatibility improvements with Office interfaces, there
are stability fixes, we’ve done extensive document fuzzing, improvements to
mail merge, updated our table styles, a huge improvement to our grammar
checker, way better OpenPGP integration, a complete rewrite of the EMF+
filters (that has been a _huge_ effort, and a much bigger impact in handling
Office docs than you might realise)... the list is huge!

 _edit:_ I’ve been rate limited, no idea why (check my history for the last
month if you don’t believe me...) so if you want info about the project from a
contributor I sadly can’t provide info on HN till someone lifts the rate-
limit.

~~~
dang
You know why we rate-limited you, since I've explained it to you in numerous
email threads going back more than two years. But for anyone reading this who
doesn't know: we rate-limit accounts that post too many low-quality and/or get
involved in flamewars. On Hacker News, "low quality" means uncivil or
unsubstantive. The standards are described in more detail at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

It's true that your recent comment history has gotten better overall (although
this thread itself is pretty borderline). We'll try taking the rate limit off
your account for now. To avoid it kicking in again, please stick to civil and
substantive comments only.

~~~
chris_wot
I don't actually. I can publish the emails if you'd like. Not sure what sort
of "low quality" comments you have been referring to for the past two years,
I'd be happy for you to point them out over email.

And how is this thread "borderline"? I explained some info on LibreOffice, as
I'm a contributor!

Incidentally, this was on the front page only about an hour ago, and now it's
on the third page. Curious how this came about?

~~~
dang
Ah, I mistook which thread I was posting to. The borderline thread was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267301)
which you were also commenting in.

I'll try to give you more of a response later when I have time. In the
meantime, though, aggressively barraging us with emails is not helping.

~~~
chris_wot
Which, uh, isn't a thread I started.

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Saad_M
One thing I keep hoping for is improvements in the UI side of LibreOffice. I
presume under Windows and Linux the UI feels more fluid and natural, but under
macOS it is definitely inferior to that of MS Office or Apple’s iWork apps.

~~~
partoa
On Linux, I still miss MS Office. Not just because of the UI, much as I prefer
the MS Office one, but also because of compatibility issues. This is for
LibreOffice Writer. Simply opening a file and saving it on LibreOffice or
OpenOffice gets it distorted on MS Office. I've resulted to using Google Docs
more often that I would like.

~~~
awill
Agreed. All other improvements LO makes are futile until compatibility is
100%. LO works very well in a closed environment with only LO users, but it
doesn't work to share documents with Office users.

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zamazingo
MSO works very well in a closed environment with only MSO users, but it
doesn't work to share documents with Office users.

That is because LO actively uses a standardized and well documented document
format while MSO created it's own that has dependencies that only MSO
resolves.

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skrowl
Here's the actual release notes instead of medium.com blogspam:
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.0](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.0)

~~~
Promarged
Thanks! This should be the canonical URL posted here.

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stephenr
If LibreOffice's "Online" frontend can get traction, I think this suite can
become a true competitor to Google Apps, etc - without the vendor lock in, and
crucially, with the ability to self-host or have it hosted for you.

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Flott
I had no idea that it was a thing. I really hope that it will be released
sooner than later!

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awill
I saw this advertised years ago. Surely something as heavy as LO isn't really
suited to a webapp.

~~~
stephenr
No less so than google docs or the msoffice equivalent?

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boznz
I for one am very grateful for the continuing efforts of the open source
community to develop this. Thanks.

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ryanackley
I used to love this project when it was OpenOffice and supported by Sun. At
that point in time it was a pretty good MS Office alternative and it was
getting better all the time.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that there is some open source alternative to
MS Office. That being said, it felt like they gave up on improving MS Office
compatibility at some point. I'm not talking about MS Publisher but the major
three: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Their support of key features from those
three hasn't noticeably improved in the last 10 years.

I've tried to use OpenOffice multiple times over the years. I always give up
because files I receive from colleagues end up looking really bad.

~~~
cesarb
> I've tried to use OpenOffice multiple times over the years. I always give up
> because files I receive from colleagues end up looking really bad.

Try LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. There have been several MS Office
compatibility enhancements in LibreOffice which are not present in OpenOffice.

~~~
ryanackley
Sorry, I meant LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I've tried both.

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teamhappy
Can you specify margins in centimeters yet?

~~~
ptx
Works for me in version 5.3. Maybe it depends on your locale? Check Options ->
Language Settings -> Languages.

