Submitted by “The Ubuntu developers met last week in Dallas to make final design decisions about the popular Linux distribution’s features and decided to use LibreOffice for its office suite.”
“The Ubuntu developers met last week in Dallas to make final design decisions about the popular Linux distribution’s features and decided to use LibreOffice for its office suite.”
Of course we all expected this and I even agree with the decision. Hopefully we will see a good UI refresh soon and some new work under the hood. But, Libre Office seems to choke on some of the extensions I currently use in OOo, particularly dMaths, which is exceedingly useful for me.
I’m going to reevaluate whether or not it is time to switch primarily to Google Docs, go back to LaTeX, or something else. The problem is finding something with a friendly enough UI and decent formula editing.
I’m thinking Lotus 1-2-3 3.0 for DOS.
You should try lyx. For me it is one the most easy tools to use and formula editing is very fast and intuitive.
LaTeX made me learn Emacs. That was back when I used a Mac, which either says something about the state of the LaTeX tools for OS X in 2004, or perhaps that Emacs + AUCTeX is such a good LaTeX platform that it’s worth using even when it integrates with the OS like a vacuum cleaner integrates with a dishwasher. Sadly, I no longer have any use for LaTeX, since I’m pretty much forced to use LibreOffice or other MS Word compatible word processors.
The UI in AUCTeX is friendly enough, but keyboard oriented. Try a few tutorials, and you’ll soon find it’s more efficient than WYSIWYG.
You can remove Libre and install OO by hand if you prefer that. The only difference is you will have to check for updates separately. Just because the distro comes with it doesn’t mean you can’t change it.
Try Lotus Symphony. I’ve been using it on os x as an alternative to OO. Its pretty good.
I like Symphony, but on a mediocre system like my netbook (which I am forced to use as my main system until I replace a power supply in the Beast) it tends to choke. LibreOffice, so far, runs fairly well under WinXP on it, and I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 for the time being on the *nix side so I’ve got OOo there. Then again, my few and far between office software needs could be adequately supported by Abiword and Gnumeric, if there were stable working versions of both for Windows. Abiword runs great on the XP side of this machine but Gnumeric is a bit unstable.
This is really obvious and expected, not sure why there is a headline for it. Already almost all the other distros have switched to libreoffice as well.
can i guess? because ubuntu is the one doing it. This site for reasons unknown to me seem to pay very close attention what ubuntu is doing, most times, what it thinks of doing.
Not sure yet if this focus is primarily meant to give ubuntu cheap publicity or to incite anti-ubuntu sentiments
Though I don’t use it myself, according to all stats I’ve seen Ubuntu is by far the most used Linux on the desktop (which is where Open/LibreOffice is used). Thus the probability of someone posting an article about this change is higher for Ubuntu as it is for NyTyX.
Is that the common perception? Interesting.
A year ago, by inspecting which fonts were installed, a survey found that OpenOffice market share in Germany was 21.5% and growing.
http://www.quantenblog.net/free-software/openoffice-market-share
Apparently the trend was that OpenOffice had gained 3% in a year. Worldwide, the share is measured at between 10% and 20% for many countries.
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-ope…
Do people really imagine that all of this appreciable market share is due primarily to Linux desktop users?
Edited 2011-01-24 21:55 UTC
I didn’t mean that OpenOffice was mainly used on Linux, I meant that OpenOffice was mainly used on desktops as opposed to, for example, servers.
Sorry for the ambiguity.
I re-read your statement: I should be the one to apologise.
You said:
The closest noun construct to the phrase “which is where Open/LibreOffice is used” in your sentence is “on the desktop”. Not “Linux”. Your text is clear, I just misread it.
I think the parentheses threw me a bit. Sorry about that.
Whether you like Ubuntu or not, they have made a push towards user friendliness and have reached deals to the point that it is one of the very few (and the most common among those few) non-Windows OS’s you might find preinstalled on a consumer PC from a known manufacturer. This means among the average Joe community (at least among those who have managed to break away from Windows and OSX) use or at least know Ubuntu. Yeah, it’s sad that many know the thing as Ubuntu and not Linux (or more properly GNU/Linux) but at least they know about it. Thus everything Ubuntu does can have a big impact on how the general public (not the geek community) sees Linux.
I wouldn’t have expected Ubuntu to do it no more than SUSE. Both of these distros have not given up on linux on the desktop in a corporate environment. I would think SUSE would do OpenOffice sense their Microsoft pact and Ubuntu for their support. The fact that Ubuntu is using LibreOffcice is probably them trying to gain cred with the GNU people sense they’re using so much in house software (ie Unity )
“Fedora will release this in Fedora 15 due out on May 10th. … In theory, openSUSE should be the first Linux to arrive with LibreOffice since its release date was set for March 10th, but the acquisition of Novell by Attachmate seems to be slowing them down a bit.”
That’s why it’s headline-worthy: With firm plans from Canonical (which may actually ship first), it means the Big 3 in Linux will switch to LibreOffice in the space of 2 months. What greater ringing endorsement of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun could possibly… oh, wait.
OpenSuse isn’t the first to arrive with it. I’ve been using LibreOffice in Arch Linux for quite some time now.
Granted Arch isn’t a ‘release’ style Linux distribution, but it sure does seem to have many things ‘first’.
Can we just take a moment to just laugh at this supercilious idiot. Too bad his 10 years of IT didn’t teach him to look things up before he comments on them.
Took me a while to find it.
Thanks
– Gilboa
This is all LibreOffice needed to conquer the world.
Not particularly surprising, seeing as how sue-happy Oracle is. I wouldn’t risk going near anything they do, open source or not.
Agreed. The sooner the distros can distance themselves from The New SCO (aka Oracle), the better!
Exactly, so when are you people going to drop mySQL?
Is MariaDB a drop-in replacement for MySQL performance-wise?
To answer the maria question:
Yes it is a drop in replacement.
However, the bulk of the development is still going to be done by mysql/oracle. Even they have admitted that. It has some cool improvements, xtradb over innodb, aria over myisam. Switching to use them may make sense in some situations, but many people
This isn’t very good news in case Oracle decides to change the license one day.
I think the best and safest thing to do if you use MySQL is to switch to PostgreSQL.
Obviously, postgres is not a drop in replacement for a non trivial app that uses mysql. At this point, despite Oracle’s crummy behavior, there isn’t a legitimate reason for such a huge change. Its still open source. Its still working. Nothing Oracle can do will stop it from continuing to work as well as it does. At some point if they stop development on it, or postgres reaches a level of significantly higher performance/features* that your app uses, then yeah, switch then.
Note, many application use mysql’s built in replication which works very easily and very well, and is very mature. Postgres just released what they consider to be an answer to mysql’s replication in postgres 9.0. I haven’t had time to look at it, but its the first version of it. I wouldn’t advise anyone to be the first to try it for a critical situation, out of sheer pragmatism.
Instead of dropping one DB for another…. projects should start utilizing ORM’s like SqlAlchemy and make their projects database agnostic.
If you use a db agnostic tool ( of which, there are many) you lose the ability to optimise your app to the db and stick another level of performance eating cruft between the app and the db.
Some apps can live with that, others cannot. Choose accordingly.
over the fact that everyone is leaving its version of OpenOffice behind and start siccing lawyers on people. Given that the last time a fork of a major Oracle-owned-but-open-source technology was successful, lawsuits were not far behind, I’d be worried.
Not that the state of Open/LibreOffice matters that much to me, seeing as Abiword and Gnumeric do all that I need and are much lighter and faster.
Edited 2011-01-24 19:05 UTC
When don’t they go nuts?
Ubuntu and lots of other distros (Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, etc.) have been shipping the Go-oo fork of OpenOffice for a long time. It was still installed under the name OpenOffice though.
Go-oo is a fork, that was created because of Sun’s politics regarding patch contributions. NeoOffice for the Mac is based on Go-oo too.
After LibreOffice was created, Go-oo was one of the first to join.
So the only thing that Ubuntu changed is the name.
Pardus 2011 already ships with LibreOffice ;P
As always in this context (that being up to date applications) one should mention Arch Linux:
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/libreoffice/
Package Details: libreoffice 3.3.0.4-1
Build Date: Jan. 21, 2011