Guest post by For years, developers decried the tight fist Sun kept on the development of its office suite, preventing the hacker culture from improving its software. So now that LibreOffice is, well, free, it’s not surprising to see one ambitious hacker has developed a mechanism for theming it. Let’s have a round of applause for Jan Holesovsky, whose patch in the upcoming 4.0 edition of LibreOffice allows you to style LibreOffice using FireFox Personae. Holesovsky’s blog is full of other interesting UI changes made to LibreOffice, proof perhaps that letting hackers hack is the best way to keep your project improving.
I’m surprised, this looks way better than I thought it would before I clicked the link.
Didn’t Firefox depreciate Personas though, for perf reasons?
If so, I haven’t heard about it. All I remember reading was that they wanted to rename them.
I believe Mozilla renamed the Personas project to themes or something like that because they wanted to create the Persona project.
Which is an implementation of the BrowserID-protocol they created.
The BrowserID protocol is basically a VerifiedEmailAddress protocol which is an improvement over the protocols like OpenID for signing up and signing in to websites.
Theming is the stupidest waste of time and deserves to be booed.
I can think of 100s of things which should be a higher priority to the LibreOffice folks than this.
I don’t think every developer is working on the same thing at the same time.
It was a developer submitted patch, likely an unpaid developer’s patch.
If I’m unpaid, I don’t really much care for what direction others (who are not paying me a salary for my time) think I should go in.
I’m quite aware that other devs are working on other things. However, one dev wasted his time with skinning and his skills could have been better used otherwise. And someone is telling me I should applaud it.
This is exactly the crap that consigns such open projects to mediocrity or worse again and again and again… It’s not a positive, it’s a negative, plain and simple.
Are you going to pay him to do it?
I look at you and all I see is someone who seems to feel entitled to someone else’s leisure time. Just be happy someone decided to spend their leisure time productively.
I know that, when I program something, if I couldn’t do what I wanted, I’d probably be playing games or reading sci-fi instead.
If someone decided to stick little flower stickers on my car for free I wouldn’t thank them for it despite their generosity.
Producing a good product is as much about what should be left out of it as what should be put into it. And seriously, theming should be left out of a productivity application, especially one that needs as much work as LibreOffice. It’s like lipstick on a pig.
I’ll gladly pay for someone to develop software that is good and useful to me. And I will call free software that is not useful crap when I think it is so.
You could always show them how it should be done by doing it…
Or I can choose a product that I prefer… which is exactly what I will do.
sure you could do that, or you could realize no one else gives a shit.
Life is full of choices that way…
Developer clearly stated that he did this project because it seemed to be fun. So either he did this project or didn’t do anything for LibreOffice at all. What seems to be better?
BTW it’s so very frustrating when other people tell you what you should do with your free time. So, what are you doing for LibreOffice? You don’t know programming, you say? Why don’t you stop doing whatever crap you’re doing now and start learning programming so you could be useful for something finally? And after you learn programming, let me choose you some really important project you’ll work in your free time.
Doing nothing seems better.
I am not telling someone what to do with their time; I am telling someone what they did with their time was useless and made a product worse.
Also, judging a product does not require, not only being able to create the same product, but actually participating in the creation of the product. I can tell you a Yugo is a completely shit car without ever needing to have built an engine or an entire car.
Edited 2013-01-11 18:20 UTC
In other words, you have what books on building successful projects (open source or otherwise) describe as a “toxic attitude”.
Do you pay him for his work? If not sit down.
Does his work make LibreOffice a crappier product that I am less likely to use or recommend?
Absolutely 100%.
As I said, it’s this silly notion that any work done is good work because eventually an infinite number of devs with craptons of spare time will eventually do the work that needs to be done that makes a lot of OSS software mediocre, tedious, or entirely unusable.
Why does it make it crappier? Is it forcing you to use Personas? No. Did it take resources away from something else? No.
When somebody gives me stuff for free, stuff that took a lot of work, I generally keep my mouth shut about things that I don’t like that doesn’t affect the functionality I need. It’s called “Not looking a gift horse in the mouth”
Try showing some appreciation for the LibreOffice devs hard work.
If I’m not using, it’s just bloat. And if I were to recommend it (again, I’m now less likely to), I may have to support someone else needlessly using it.
Also, no, I’m not thankful for things that I don’t need and actively do not want just because they are free.
Edited 2013-01-11 18:12 UTC
I’ll bet you’re a blast at parties.
No, quite the opposite. Whenever I show up at parties a collective moan of, “Crap, it’s the guy who thinks OSS devs wasting time and resources on skinning makes OSS projects look like shit,” rings out, the music screeches to a halt, the alcohol stops flowing, and everyone goes home.
Oh wait, not that… No one at a single party I’ve ever gone to has ever cared about or been influenced by my opinion of OSS devs spending their time on inanities.
I mean that you seem to be the type to shit on other people’s conversations because somebody has different priorities than you.
I mean, what if the guy who made the change did it as an exercise in practicing UI design for the sake of just learning something? Does it even matter to you?
Are you going to walk into his party and do an upper-decker* just to feel smug?
“Hey. Look at this cool model rocket I built.”
“Pfft. Who cares. We already have rockets that can send probes to the outer plants. You’ve contributed nothing.”
*(If you don’t know, you might not want to look that up)
Edited 2013-01-12 10:56 UTC
This is exciting news. I’m sure putting birds in the f–king toolbar will really help my productivity.
I’m hoping for easier icon changing. For some reason, OOo refuses to accept my icon changes in KDE, even though Gtk+ is properly configured.
I believe it has its own internal icon theming which offers three choices: Oxygen, Human, and Tango.
(On my system, I’m using Elementary as the icon theme and LibreOffice’s automatic mode chooses Tango as the closest available option. Manual selection is available through Tools > Options > View)
Also, a lot of distros package all three separately, so a system may not have all of them available by default.
Edited 2013-01-10 23:26 UTC
Oh? So it can’t, say, use Faenza?
That’s a bummer.
Check this out:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/108905/install-faenza-icons-on-libre…
It worked. I’ve got Faenza as my icon set now for LibreOffice – it looks stunning.
That is because Libre Office does not use GTK. It has its own toolkit so it makes direct theming changes not work all that well
Edited 2013-01-11 00:00 UTC
Yeah. I’m not exactly a fan of the concept myself. The concept of LibreOffice is good… but this is just f**king dumb. A background picture? Come the f*** on, people.
Right. A background picture is not a ‘theme’! What it needs is a new icon theme.
If you want a new Icon theme, tell them about it on the design mailing list. Also I think you’ll find that there are idea’s for this aswell, check the wiki and the design whiteboards
One of the biggest problems of OpenOffice is that it uses its own GUI toolkit. I really which they would port it to uses GTK or QT.
At least GTK and QT apps can now read the same theme info, QT apps looks just fine under Gnome and well, have not tried GTK under KDE, but I assume that GTK is smart enough to do the right thing.
Anyway, QT does have its problems, but it is a better toolkit than the OpenOffice widget set.
QT != Qt.
You mean Qt, not QT.
You assume too much.
Qt has QGtkStyle as an officially-supported component.
The GTK+ equivalent is a 3rd-party project that seems to have withered on the vine and the only build of it I’ve seen for modern Ubuntu is as part of the Trinity PPA. (Trinity is the KDE 3 fork)
Totally un-newsworthy. A picture in the backround, come on, really? You can call theming something that lets you turn the UI into Ribbon, not this.
Fun to see all the anger on this post. I agree graphical changes to the UI shouldn’t be the highest priority on this project, but this was one guy’s contribution and it’s cool. Also, I will receive it for free, which is also cool and thanks to the generosity of that one hacker, who has done some other useful things as well.
That said, I worry LibreOffice is kind of floundering these days. I wish them well but their time should be spent on things like .docx compatibility (I know, it’s impossible). I’ve switched to http://www.softmakeroffice.de instead and like it: it’s fast and its compatability with .docx is really excellent. The things I liked most about StarOffice and then early versions of Libreoffice were the things that made it different from Word: the side toolbar, and really prominent stylists and navigator, the database interface on the top of the screen and the message window at the bottom. I’ve gotten bored with it since it has turned into something so similar to Word. Maybe the birds on the toolbar will make the difference, ha ha ha.
I agree. Some how people assume that if this guy is adding these features in his own time it takes time out from the overall project.
Isn’t this the point of open source if you don’t like something contribute and get it added. So a portion of OS News readers don’t like it, they don’t have to use that feature at all.
From the look of his blog his main skills are in tinkering with the UI. Who knows what his skills will be like in a years time.
Libre Office could use a UI upgrade and no one is going to learn those skills overnight.
Having to download a new large .dmg each time they release a point release sucks. One day I would like the project to start using delta updates, I feel it should have a much higher priority. Helping users to be always on the newest stable relase helps everyone.
Switching to Fedora should solve one of your problems.
I think that great. Not because it solves anything, but it is just cool. Is there any single one office suite with themes? It’s only a background image, but so what? It’s already better then competition.
Small features are selling software.