
LibreOffice: The Next Five Years - ingve
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/825598/21fb7c2a3f9358e7/
======
openfuture
It's weird to me that people complain over "old and ugly" interfaces.
Consistency is worth so much more than fad-chasing. Learning something is more
worthwhile if you are able to trust that it won't change underneath you.

Take MS Office for example, I was made to learn how to use it in elementary
school, we had an exam where we got a printed out page and had to reproduce it
in an hour. This was supposed to be fundamental computer knowledge like
learning to type.

I still have the same keyboard layout as back then but MS Office now has some
janky "ribbon interface" which bears no resemblance to how it used to be.
Although it should be criminal for public schools to teach proprietary
software, we can forget about that for a minute and instead consider how
futile it is to teach things that are not open standards or at least free
software. You have absolutely no assurance that this knowledge will still be
applicable even just a few years later.

My hope is that free software projects will attempt to preserve old interfaces
(making them accessible via initial configuration) when they make updates.
Besides, you shouldn't be replacing your GUI if your architecture hasn't got a
clear separation between presentation and core logic.

~~~
Jonnax
The ribbon interface was adopted in 2007. That's 13 years ago.

What is the jank? It's a tabbed interface of buttons instead of menus and sub
menus.

The most common operations are descriptive buttons.

Give someone word 2003 or word 2020 who has never used a word processor
before. Which one would be more intuitive?

It's bad UI if people just learn where to click. They should be able to think
in terms of "I want to do X" and be able to do that as quick as possible.

Of course with specialised tools that's a different story. AutoCAD hasn't
really changed its interface but it got superceded in areas by new
applications that break people's workflows in a lot of cases.

It's just a word processor. The knowledge you should have gained when being
taught was the concepts of what you can do with one.

That should allow you to adapt to different software. Once you've used a word
processor you don't need to read the help page for Google Docs.

It's not like switching from Maya to Blender.

I don't agree on the free software projects point. Often they're made by
volunteers. And anything too "daring" would be shouted down by the community.

~~~
red_admiral
I'm going to disagree here.

Alice is a new user who has never used Word before. Between word 2003 and
2020, I grant she'll pick up 2020 much more quickly - point in favour of the
new one.

Bob is an employee who uses Word just short of 4 hours a day, 5 days a week
writing and editing reports (the rest of the time he spends in Outlook, excel
etc.). If there's a task that Bob does 50 times in a typical week, then it
doesn't matter so much to him whether it takes a bit longer to learn the
command (after about the 150th time he'll have got used to it), but it matters
a lot how fast he can do it once he's learnt it. Bob literally becomes more
productive by having an interface which he can operate by muscle memory, in a
way that more than pays off the initial training costs.

Think of keyboard shortcuts for example: they're completely unintuitive to a
newcomer, but with experience, Control+Z and Control+C, Control+V and the like
save time, and time is money. My favourite word trick in this category,
incidentally, is Control+Space "remove formatting" for text you've pasted in
from elsewhere; it doesn't work all of the time though. You used to be able to
do Control+Shift+V for "paste as plain text", I don't know which version
removed that again but I consider it a great loss. Paste -> Keep Text Only
takes just longer enough to be annoying.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
So what's kept Bob from committing the ribbon interface to memory in the past
17 years?

~~~
XorNot
The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the
common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd
party extensions).

Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph
settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the
object and image editing at the bottom.

Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third as much. Reviewing
for some reason is now on a separate tab. The menus are less commonly used
functions are non-existent, stuck somewhere under "File" which now takes over
the whole screen when I open it.

It is not just "different" it's worse. It removes the basic ability to
prioritize my interface to the types of tasks I'm doing, in favor of some
vaguely defined every-user who is not actually a real user.

~~~
craftinator
They've optimized it for the least common denominator, not for specialized use
or for power users. Short term this is a positive approach as it's more
approachable for people who are just learning or are very lightweight users.
But for people who have a lot of experience or use it often, it's a serious
regression.

~~~
airstrike
I'm a "Power User" and I've memorized every single hotkey on the Excel ribbon
interface to the point that I don't care where they are.

Wrap text? Alt H A W

Open settings? Alt T F T

Change to page break view? Alt W I. Go back to normal view with Alt W L

Take the border I currently have on the top edge of a cell and swap it to the
bottom? Alt H B M Alt+T Alt+B

Paste values transposing? Alt H V S V E. Want to follow the old accelerator?
Alt E S V E also works

Power users don't need to care what the ribbon / menu looks like. They learn
hotkeys.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I'm an emacs user. You have made me feel warm inside.

~~~
smabie
Emacs is a lot like Excel in many ways: they both make you feel like wizards.
I suck at excel, but I've seen some analysts who are crazy good at it. You
watch them use it and numbers and shit just start appearing out of nowhere.
It's pure magic!

------
ghaff
There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is
the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there
is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I
sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing
them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never
again the norm for me. Shared documents are probably a much overlooked enabler
for people to work remotely in the current situation.

Added: They do mention LibreOffice Online but that seems like it should be a
more central point in the discussion.

~~~
hnarn
I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of
LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365.
There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I
don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when
compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code
freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that I'm advocating one) would make
the product unusable five years down the road.

~~~
leonidasv
They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.

~~~
lbwtaylor
I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering. I only did a very
brief demo of it, but I was not impressed.

~~~
leonidasv
Yes, unfortunately. Makes impossible to work under unstable connections.

I hope Webasm enable porting at least some of the rendering code to client-
side in the future.

------
mapgrep
Democrats in the US House of Representatives just approved a $741 billion
defense spending package. It will almost certainly clear the senate and be
signed by the president.

Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice developers
and maybe say 20 more. There would be no need for these acrobatics around
source availability.

I understand why the companies need to do this. But there is an existing
system for funding things with widespread benefits to society. It’s called the
government.

~~~
macspoofing
>Imagine taking enough of that money to support these 40 LibreOffice
developers and maybe say 20 more.

There are infinite ways to spend every dollar, why is LibreOffice funding
worthy? In other words, why is LibreOffice's popularity so low that it cannot
find a way to fund its operations? Which then raises the question - why do you
want to fund an unpopular project?

~~~
komali2
I think the idea is that 1% of a b52 bomber might take LibreOffice to an
unparalleled place for a libre project.

~~~
macspoofing
I get the 'idea'. There are more things to fund then there are funding dollars
available ... by many orders of magnitude, so you have to make decisions. One
of those decisions is whether or not to pay for a certain numbers of b52
bombers. Another, completely separate decision, is whether to fund a very
specific niche open source project. Linking those two is disingenuous. If you
want funding for LibreOffice, make the case to your representative. Make the
case to others so they make the case to your representative.

------
maxmouchet
As much as I love free software, LibreOffice interface feels old and ugly (to
me, at least). It would be nice if there was more focus on the UX/UI design in
open source projects. Of course, most programmers are not UX/UI designers, and
designers don't tend to work for free on open source projects.

~~~
unglaublich
No... the problem with desktop software is that creating a good UI/UX is a
hard software problem typically solved by software developers instead of
designers. Whereas, the accessibility and power of web technologies show that
making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically attracts
more designers yielding better UX/UI.

~~~
ubercow13
>making UI/UX an easier software problem (HTML, CSS, JS) automatically
attracts more designers yielding better UX/UI

I find this a bit questionable. What are some examples of this good UX and UI?
Many HTML-ish UIs I can think of are not good. Slack, Discord, modern Windows
apps such as the new settings app for example. They tend to suffer from poor
reimplementations of native widget functionality, poor implementations of
scrollable elements especially infinitely scrollable ones, low information
density and too much whitespace often exacerbated by flat design, janky
responsiveness often with high latency.

~~~
unglaublich
Apart from the remarks about flat design, whitespace and information-density,
which are very personal imho, I would say Google Drive, Google Docs, Microsoft
Office Online, GitHub source code editor, Visual Studio code, Atom, all do a
good job.

~~~
jiggunjer
Good job? Maybe on a beefy first-world computer. The UX goes down the drain if
you try to run a few of those apps at once.

~~~
catalogia
Doubtlessly the programmers who work on those products use computers with
dozens of gigabytes of ram and half a dozen cores or more. They're out of
touch with the sort of computers a TON of casual computer owners are using
daily.

------
mgbmtl
I hate to rant, but there is a weird sense of entitlement in many comments. An
assumption that software should "just work", be completely bug free, have the
best design, have developers quickly responding to bug reports, etc, while
giving away the product for free.

I might not use an office suite very often, but when I do, I'm grateful it
exists and is free/libre. Some orgs (gov, companies, service
providers/resellers) do rely on LibreOffice, and they should really make sure
that core developers can keep on going.

(I work for a free software service provider/reseller and core developer, this
comes up regularly)

~~~
genidoi
This is the de facto complaint of open source software, and initially I
thought the entitlement can really only be explained by laziness, after all
why don't people just bother to read the source code and contribute the
feature they want?

But then I realized its way way more rudimentary than that. A substantial
amount of software developers struggle w/ interpersonal communication skills,
and so often what may have been intended as a polite feature suggestion came
across as entitlement, if not bewilderment that a feature doesn't exist
through a poor choice of words combined with a lack of empathy that we see
everywhere throughout the internet anyway.

~~~
danans
> why don't people just bother to read the source code and contribute the
> feature they want?

It is a bit far fetched to expect non programmer users to read the source
code, much less contribute the feature (i.e. from requirements gathering to
feasibility analysis, to design, implementation, testing, and release) isn't
it?

That is the kind of work that only a compensated team would do, especially and
something as complex as an office productivity suite. In other nonprofit
areas, your organizations doing work rely on charitable contributions from
donors who share the same interests. Until such a time that such donors exist,
it's hard to see how the development model is funded.

> A substantial amount of software developers struggle w/ interpersonal
> communication skills, and so often what may have been intended as a polite
> feature suggestion came across as entitlement

They might have interpersonal issues, but it seems like the deeper issue here
is more with the incentive model, not with the developers' personality traits.

~~~
sergeykish
So you say most of the users can't utilize freedom to change program. Neither
coding, not testing, not money, not individually, not collectively.

In other words - they take someones else work for free and give nothing back.
And then they complain about quality.

------
ulisesrmzroche
Why so much talk about the ribbon? This article has nothing to say about that.
This is about a Personal Edition and an Enterprise edition and how little
revenue its actually coming in.

Basically, libre office won't be libre anymore. Looks like Enterprise is gonna
have a commercial license.

By the way, I think the ribbon is far better than the ugly dropdown menus.
It's also been over a decade since it was introduced. Some of yall are so
resistant to change is bordering on zealotry. I hate to remind everyone about
dropbox but dropbox.

~~~
crazygringo
> _Basically, libre office won 't be libre anymore_

The personal version still will be, right?

Now this would be something to worry about if all new feature development were
put into enterprise, and the personal version stagnated.

But from my experience in enterprise software, enterprise features are
generally not even applicable to consumer users at all. They're things like
single sign-on, approval workflow integration, private cloud integration and
whatnot.

It's not as if a bugfix for page margins will make it to the enterprise
version and not the personal one.

So this doesn't feel like something to worry about. If it provides the
necessary financial resources to keep the personal edition alive, then I'm all
for it.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
Yeah I’m cool with it too, it’s just not quote unquote true free software
anymore. Which should be big news, but basically the whole first page of
comments is all about the MS word ribbon

Madness of crowds for sure

------
galacticdessert
It might sound stupid, but looking at the marketing plan attached to this
article (
[https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/jzryGw7XDkJadmo#p...](https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/jzryGw7XDkJadmo#pdfviewer)
) I wonder how they could deliver such an important message in such a messy
way. There are context slides together with strategy slides, together with
marketing slides, together with analysis slides. the best one is slide 48,
which seems to be a leftover of the initial storyline?

I really like LibreOffice and I try to push its usage where I can, but reading
about a potentially risky development strategy in such a messy way makes me
wonder if it has been thought out so well or it is a muddy idea reflected in
unclear writing.

------
duncanawoods
Huh. I just tried Calc (6.0.7.3, Ubuntu 18.04) again this morning for the
first time in a while and it crashed in seconds after right-clicking a few
column headers. It's repeatable.

When trying to navigate the very confusing document recovery dialogs to
restart it, it then launched as Writer not Calc.

I really wish it was an option but JFC. My experience with has always been so
bad it doesn't even feel worth raising a bug report.

~~~
tluyben2
Could you make a video of that? I am clicking myself silly (ubuntu 18.04 /
6.0.7.3) and cannot repeat that behavior. I use calc a lot and it rarely
crashes (less than excel/windows which, on my ms surface tablet, actually
quite regularly crashes or hangs).

~~~
duncanawoods
Sure, here you go:

[https://imgur.com/a/PZMaqff](https://imgur.com/a/PZMaqff)

org.gnome.Shell.desktop[4355]: Window manager warning: Invalid
WM_TRANSIENT_FOR window 0x9000024 specified for 0x9000965 (LibreOffic).

You have shamed me into raising a bug ;)

edit: raised, the 6.0 branch is EOL, doesn't happen in 6.4.5.2

~~~
asddubs
yup, that's the thing, people love to complain on random social media
platforms, but most people can't be bothered to report bugs. been guilty of it
myself as well of course

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
As someone who frequently encounters bugs, let me explain why I don't usually
bother to file bug reports: No one cares.

Choose any large long-lived open source project at random and search their
issue tracker and I guarantee you can find at least 3 open bugs that are 5
years old or more. I know, because I've run into these bugs, as have dozens of
others, and went to report them only to find they had already been reported
years ago with no action taken by the developers.

Filing bugs takes time. You're going to want reproducible steps, you're going
to want logs, you're going to want me to try different things. That's fine,
and I'm willing to do that to get my bug fixed, but only if I think you
actually give enough of a shit to fix it. I don't enjoy wasting my time any
more than you do. When I see 5 year old open issues your tracker, where
several users have chimed in, submitted logs, etc. and you've done nothing, I
assume you don't care so neither do I.

Worse yet, many developers are downright hostile to users reporting bugs or,
god forbid, making feature suggestions. Spend five minutes in GNOME's issue
tracker to see what I mean.

~~~
chronolitus
For example, I encounter this bug every day when I open Firefox (latest
version) on i3wm. "Opened 9 years ago."

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747)

~~~
sergeykish
Bug is open, "firefox57 - wontfix" means "would not be fixed in Firefox 57"

* Create New Account

* Edit Bug

* Tracking Flags: $version => affected

* Save Changes

Do it for every version. It is extremely hard to know is issue resolved or
not. I've tried to reproduce session restore on Developers Edition - nope, I
can't. There is no minimal xmonad config attached. Is it solved by ewmh (helps
at least with fullscreen)? If bug "is simple to fix" try to fix yourself.

------
kleiba
Do people use LibreOffice because it's open-source or because it you don't
have to pay for it? In either case, the "enterprise edition" they envision
will fail to service either camp.

If you have to spend any money at all, you might as well spend the money that
MS Office costs. Or else, the main competitor is not MS Office but Google
Docs.

~~~
ubermonkey
The people _I_ know use LO for essentially political reasons.

I've never really tried to use anything other than MS Office, because for my
whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using standard
Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document exchange
would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's tools or
whatever.

Plus, honest go God, Word and Excel are really, really good at what they do.
Word got their more slowly, but once Excel ate Lotus 1-2-3, there really never
was another competitor there, and Excel just kept getting more and more
powerful. It's a wonderful tool.

(Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further -- into a true
database, or into a proper business intelligent /reporting tool, or whatever
-- and end up creating their own really janky versions of these things within
Excel with macros and insane formulas hidden out in AA:5234 or whtaever;
that's a problem for sure. But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a
problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>for my whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using
standard Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document
exchange would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's
tools or whatever. //

How long is that career? Over my working life
StarOffice/OpenOffice/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice have been far more compatible
(for relatively basic documents) with other versions of MSWord than MSWord
has, I don't really have experience of cross-compatibility from the last 5
years or so though.

~~~
ubermonkey
30 years.

And no, what you say absolutely has not been my experience. Any rich
formatting tends to get lost or munged, and support for stylesheets /
templates between Office and non-Office platforms was woefully lacking.

If you're alone, sure, the free or Free option might be a good choice. But
your time has value, so if you're collaborating with other people using true
Office, just use Office. You'll be happier.

------
mikece
Is there a manifesto or document anywhere which lays out the economic case for
(US) Federal grants to develop free software? How many developers and how many
projects could be staffed full-time with a billion dollars set aside annually
for an Office of Open Source Software?

(Of course such an office would descend into a cluster-[bleep] of political
warfare over topics that have nothing to do with developing software so
spending nothing probably gets as much done in this area than creating a
government office which costs money and doesn’t get anything accomplished.)

~~~
x87678r
A better deal would be Fed paying MS, then MS charging other countries all
over the world and MS collects big $$$ in profits and US tax paid. Much of SV
started like this too.

------
eeereerews
> Another pathology is that there are companies who ship LibreOffice, often
> claiming support, but then file all their tickets up-stream and hope they
> are fixed for free.

Lmao... but thinking again, given the average user's bug-filing abilities, a
professional bug-filer might actually be useful.

~~~
buovjaga
Indeed. I created this initiative some time ago, but sadly have not been able
to get folks responsible for deployments involved:
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Guidelines_for_public...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Guidelines_for_public_and_private_sector_deployments)

I guess it's just another reflection of the passivity we witness everywhere.

------
zelphirkalt
I am looking forward to future development of LibreOffice. For me it has
become better and better. I've never had a new installation, or update of LO
which made me think "If only I had stuck to the old version!"

More and more I am using plain text formats these days, which I then convert
into other things, but from time to time it is nice to have LO at the ready,
knowing, that it is free software and as such will always be available, in our
collective resources.

A friend of mine recently complained about pictures disappearing and floating
over text area margins in their document and having to put them back in in a
200 page document. I've never had such a problem. However, there seem to be
some rough edges left to improve.

I cannot complain about the user interface actually. To me it is quite
intuitive and I find everything I usually need rather quickly.

------
davidhyde
It seems like this whole thing could be solved by renaming the tag from
"Personal Edition" to "Lite Edition" or something. People want to use and
"office" product for work, duh. The document foundation keep arguing that
funding is needed and the users keep arguing that they want a free version for
commercial use and that naming is important because "the boss won't read the
license agreement but look at the name! Personal Edition"

Why are people on the defensive always so blinded by the obvious? If you
understand what people are getting upset about then, on the first line of the
letter, they should state, unambiguously, exactly what people are having an
issue with. Instead, the introduction is about the success of LibraOffice
which is not contended and actually somewhat irrelevant. Then this:

> So it is a bit surprising to see the project's core developers in a sort of
> crisis mode while users worry about a tag that showed up in the project's
> repository

This sentence just tells the reader that you still don't understand what the
fuss is about because you are referring to past good will and not the simple
fact that the name is wrong. Readers want to know that you understand their
point of view before they are willing to read about your point of view.

~~~
mrob
"Lite Edition" isn't much better. The usual name for this kind of thing is
"Community Edition", which has no negative connotations. But I don't see why
it needs any special name. The LibreOffice brand is already harmed by the
continued existence of OpenOffice, which many people still think of as the
default free (as in beer) office suite despite its obsolescence. Complicating
the LibreOffice name will only make things worse. IMO it should remain plain
"LibreOffice", and the paid support version can be "LibreOffice Enterprise
Edition".

~~~
zucker42
Someone from TDF responded to a similar comment on Reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ho0n51/update_on_lib...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ho0n51/update_on_libreoffice_naming_and_tdfs_ecosystem/fxfer3k/?context=2)

------
munro
I just loaded up LibreOffice to give it a try, I would like to move off of
Google as much as possible. 5 minutes in, I'm like, this is not that bad! Then
this happened:

> Due to an unexpected error, LibreOffice crashed. All the files you were
> working on will now be saved. The next time LibreOffice is launched, your
> files will be recovered automatically.

I really require tools with multi platform live collaboration--I've been
looking at Apple's Calc, as a possible switch, as well.

------
mikece
Maybe I'm seeing what I want but it seems that the plan is for the document
formats and editing programs to be free while generating revenue from
infrastructure around delivering something "Sharepoint-like" (or a SaaS
service to do similar), complete with a throat to choke/vendor to blame if
things go sideways. I don't see this as fundamentally different from the
choice of running CentOS versus paying for RHEL: the latter is the same
software but comes with enterprise assurances that allow the CIO to sleep at
night.

I'm sure there's someone could write a compelling essay along the lines of
"Free Software isn't free of charge" if someone were inclined to pursue it.
Even people like RMS have to eat from time to time.

------
_bxg1
> The problem is compounded by companies that sell inexpensive "support" for
> LibreOffice, but which are not involved in its development and are not
> really able to provide that support. Those companies "file all their tickets
> up-stream and hope they are fixed for free". Companies working in that mode
> have no problem pricing their offerings below those of the companies doing
> the actual work (and thus winning much of the business that does exist). In
> addition, they simply call their offerings "LibreOffice", which actually
> looks more authentic than services from other companies, which are trying to
> build their own brands around LibreOffice support.

Is this not a cut-and-dry case of trademark violation?

------
inanutshellus
Every time I open LibreOffice and see the loading logo... I'm amazed it's free
software.

I'm thankful to everyone that has contributed to it.

------
einpoklum
The Document Foundation should - IMHO - employ a more nuanced, and "deeper",
community funding effort. Even though, when downloading it, we see a payment
link - there is almost no motivation to press it:

1\. We are in a hurry to go on with the download.

2\. It's called a "donation" \- which it isn't. It's support for the project,
financing further development and bug removal, and should be presented that
way.

3\. We have zero information about the situation The Document Foundation is
in, what it needs money for, what its income stream look like and why, etc. I
think Thunderbird
([https://www.thunderbird.net/](https://www.thunderbird.net/)) has been doing
a better job in that respect.

4\. There doesn't seem to be an effort to encourage or even make-it-easy-for
users (corporate or individual) to engage in community activity, of the kind
that increases commitment to the project and also awareness to the importance
of supporting the project financially.

\------------------------

Also - please consider actually supporting both projects I mentioned,
financially:

* LibreOffice: [https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/](https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/)

* Thunderbird: [https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/](https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/)

and consider doing some volunteer QA work on LibreOffice by reporting bugs or
even getting into the code. I, particularly, am very involved with Right-to-
Left, Hebrew and some Arabic language issues.

------
xvilka
Instead of delivering the dead and long stalled project Apache should admit
the failure of OpenOffice (with their commit rate vs LibreOffice's one it's
obvious) and redirect to LibreOffice instead. They should officially deprecate
it. Right now they are stealing potential users of LO with their substandard
product.

------
Jonnax
I haven't used Libreoffice in years.

Did they ever update the UI styling?

I remember it had a very "java" look to it.

You know that feeling when you open an app, you know it's going to be a bit
janky.

~~~
ACS_Solver
It has visual class libraries that give LO a slightly different look depending
on what you're running it on.

I'm typing this from a Debian system running KDE Plasma, and my LibreOffice
reports using the gtk3_kde5 VCL. It uses Qt5 widgets and looks, for the most
part, like a regular KDE Qt5 application. It no longer looks or feels like a
Java application. Because it's not - Java is optional except in LibreOffice
Base. You can disable JRE in the options, and LO parts that are not Base will
retain nearly all functionality.

~~~
andrewshadura
To be completely fair, it never looked like a Java application.

------
Shared404
> so nobody thinks in terms of buying support for any office suite[.]

In my experience working in a repair shop, people only think in these terms
when buying an office suite, regardless of if they'll actually use the
official support. This only applies to individuals though, not corps.

------
rspoerri
I‘d like to use a open source text editor. But libreoffice text rendering is
so bad, i cant use it. At least thats the case for me on osx, but i think this
applies to all plattforms.

Just compare text rendered in libreoffice and to the one in pages. It hurts my
eyes.

~~~
grandinj
(LO Dev) Unfortunately, mac has the least interested programmers available to
debug issues, and there is some weird interaction going on with our rendering
on macOS that we can't track down.

------
pythonwizz
They do a great job.

But I use [commercial] Softmaker Office. They offer a free version too:
[https://www.freeoffice.com/en/](https://www.freeoffice.com/en/)

~~~
uxcolumbo
Thanks for posting this.

I'm looking for a MS Office replacement, not heard of Softmaker Office before.
I'm still using an old version of Office, but it doesn't work well on a high
DPI screen.

What's your experience with Softmaker Office - anything you're missing from MS
Office (if you've used it before Softmaker Office)?

~~~
joyj2nd
I miss nothing. Buts thats me. If you need visual basic scripts, maybe it is
not for you. AFAIK it has its own scripting language. There is no risk to test
the free version. You can actually use the free version, the limitations are
not tremendous. I always buy it.

------
jandrese
Personally I find LibreOffice Writer to be fine for my regular reports until
something goes wrong and then it's like old versions of Word.

For example, occasionally when I'm making a numbered list the tenth item and
beyond will be bounced over a full tabstop which looks horrible. Then I'm
trying to work around the problem by messing with the tab stops which causes
problems for the rest of the document.

It's really hard to fix when something goes wrong as a casual user. Inserting
images/figures is fraught with peril too. I sometimes find myself hacking the
doc until it looks presentable and then not touching it. It's like those old
"smart" systems that weren't quite smart enough to get it right, but would
fight you tooth and nail when you tried to undo what they did.

For what its worth I prefer the consistency of its interface over the ever
changing ribbon of Word. Word also tries to guess what you want and when it
guesses wrong it's really annoying.

------
Certhas
We kind of need a version of CC-BY-NC. Preferably with a governance model that
then distributes money from commercial licenses to contributors... Or
government funded Open source. There is no reason for society to try to do
something as intrinsically cooperative as building software through market
mechanisms.

------
Animats
Summary"

 _... There is the Personal Edition, which would be "forever free" and only
available from the Document Foundation. This release would be tagged,
according to the plan, "volunteer supported, not suggested for production
environments or strategic documents". The alternative would be "LibreOffice
Enterprise", which would only be available from "ecosystem members". This
version would come with commercial support and a corresponding price tag. ...
"There will be an X month gap between the release of the two versions:
LibreOffice Online Enterprise and LibreOffice Online Personal"._

------
mixmastamyk
Have any of the support companies tried paying bounties for tickets? Seems
like it would get revenue pointed at the bugs/enhancements that customers
wanted worked on.

Do they have a subscription to pay LO directly?

------
jaxr
I don't mind LibreOffice's interface in general. Only a sublime style Ctrl+p
find would make a huge difference. That alone would put it's interface on top
of MS office in my opinion.

------
tannhaeuser
I find it noteworthy that LibreOffice Online is what's bringing in cash
according to TFA. What it might tell us is that the prevalence of cloud and
online services today is just a consequence and natural market reaction to
F/OSS proliferation. LO/OO.o themselves have open-sourced their product many
years ago when it still was owned by Sun (I even know developers in Hamburg
who worked on it in the 1990's when it still was called Star Office).

------
blendergeek
I have a few questions that don't seem to be fully answered in the post.

> This “Personal Edition” tag ... has the purpose of differentiating the
> current, free and community-supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice
> Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our
> ecosystem.

Will this "LibreOffice Enterprise" be Free as in Freedom? Would I be able to
package it up myself and call it "Community ENTerprise Office Suite"?

~~~
zucker42
This isn't really changing anything. LibreOffice is under the GPL. It's just a
marketing attempt to get large organizations to realize that they should
contribute back to the ecosystem if they rely on LibreOffice.

~~~
blendergeek
LibreOffice is currently under the LGPLv3 and the MPLv2, not the GPL.

Further, the document refers to 'new products' that could be under the
'LibreOffice Enterprise' umbrella. Could any of these be proprietary? Do we
have any assurances?

~~~
zucker42
You are correct. I don't know how I fabricated that idea.

In response to your second point, there seems to be strong opposition to open
core from some key players in the community.

------
type0
Personal Edition implies it won't have important collaboration features needed
in organizations. And whether that will be true or not isn't the issue, less
volunteers and non-profits will end up using LibreOffice, instead they could
just called it Community Edition like every other FOSS project. They will end
up with less volunteer contributors, but maybe that's what TDF wants, it's a
pity.

------
progx
Can we expect an Auto-Update within the next 5 years?

~~~
mikece
What's wrong with updating via Flatpack or AppImage (or Brew or Chocolatey)?

------
simion314
About people hating change, in my IDE an update renamed a menu from "revert"
to "Rollback" , for a while I had issues finding this menu because my brain
was searching for the old text and just skipping over the new one.

Is it my fault that change causes productivity loss? Should we take a pause
and train ourselves after each software/webpage does a change?

------
pengaru
Kind of odd that they don't compare themselves to Blender and its successful
foundation in the article, not even mentioned once.

------
aphroz
Is there a hosted service for LibreOffice online ? I wish I could find a
better replacement for Google Drive.

~~~
npteljes
I recommend checking out ONLYOFFICE. They have a personal tier with a small
online storage for free. And everything is AGPLv3.

[https://personal.onlyoffice.com/](https://personal.onlyoffice.com/)

~~~
andrewshadura
OnlyOffice are not a community-oriented project, with their aggressive usage
of AGPL+CLA, previous policy of withholding parts of code and throwing the
rest over the wall once in a while, and their compatibility is far from what
they claim: LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO. Also, feature-wise
it's crippled in comparison not only with LibreOffice proper, but even with
LibreOffice Online.

~~~
lbwtaylor
> LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO

Why do you say that? I trialed both of them with an array of complex Word
documents and OnlyOffice far outperformed.

~~~
andrewshadura
> > LibreOffice is far better compatible with MSO

> Why do you say that? I trialed both of them with an array of complex Word
> documents and OnlyOffice far outperformed.

Not in my experience. OnlyOffice often failed to render simple documents
LibreOffice had no problems with at all.

------
azinman2
I was hoping to find an actual plan towards making the software better, more
usable, and desirable. Instead it’s just a “marketing plan” about splitting
apart something that lags behind.

Where’s the vision?!

------
beezle
So much talk about UI this and that - how about leaving UI and feature set
alone and instead focus on speed and memory foot print?

Though recent versions are better, it still feels slow compared to Office.

------
f0ok
If LibreOffice is offering a paid version for extra features / services,
considering what they are already offering, I would certainly paid, or at
least have a strong interest.

------
stefankeys
Wordstar and Wordperfect were easier to use imo.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
I still remember the inconveniently tall keyboard templates (e.g.
[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&q=wor...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&q=wordperfect+keyboard+template))
for WordPerfect to tell users where all the function were. Give me the ribbon
bar anyday.

------
stefankeys
GUI was a mistake.

------
fock
so basically iceweasel vs. firefox again. I'm fine with that (and still miss
the icon)

~~~
teekert
Could be that the enterprise will include some cloud sync for auto backup
(like O365/OneDrive), of course that will not be free. Best case (call me
naive) but it could just be that the personal edition simply does not ask for
the syncing, worst case, it will nag you constantly.

~~~
fock
well, if you're paying for the cloud, you can pay for the free-as in freedom-
software as well I guess ;)

------
kungato
Is there any electron gpl based Word and Excel alternative? I always imagined
running on top of electron helped you skip a lot of work and helped the app
not look like shit/LibreOffice

~~~
ubercow13
Libreoffice looks like a native desktop app. How do electron apps look better
than that?

~~~
HeckFeck
Plus, it is possible to customise the icons and colour scheme. There's light
mode, dark mode, blue mode, even pink...

