Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL Red Hat is to stop packaging a native version of the LibreOffice suite for its enterprise Linux distro. According to a post on the Fedora Development mailing list, the official RPM packages for LibreOffice were orphaned. Existing RHEL releases 7, 8, and 9 will still be updated, however. The official stated reason is that the …
StarOffice's 'Desktop' was more like what Windows 3.x once had included as a 'Program Manager' application, rather than a complete desktop environment. That said, the developers actually had implemented much of their windowing stuff themselves at that point, the intention was to make cross-platform development easier. The 'Desktop', though, was the first thing that was thrown overboard when StarOffice was mutilated to become OpenOffice after Star Division was sold to Sun, and contrary to several other components which were thrown away in the transition, like the calendar plus scheduler, the full-fledged e-mail and usenet client or the excellent MDI implementation that kept 'everything in one place' and interoperable (what had been Star Division's marketing slogan at one point), didn't clutter the screen with copies of the same menu and button bars on each separate document window—having to do without that 'Desktop' thing was no real loss. All in all, though, OpenOffice was just the sorry leftovers from what StarOffice 5.x had originally been, and the feature richness, and, in parts, even the usability that StarOffice offered has never been reached again, not even in the latest versions of LibreOffice.
I once read that early versions of OO & maybe LO had SeaMonkey tucked away inside but never exposed, mostly to get access to the address book database, which seems a bit excessive.
Mail/Usenet/RSS/Calendar functionality is the one thing that's really missing even if only to stop Office fans whining that it doesn't have them.
...[libreoffice]...number 374 different files.
Yes, a lot. But have you taken a look at the Fedora TeXLive, Perl or Python distributions? They are all monsters.
And that is the problem with big projects. They can grow to incredible complexity and then, at some probability, Xkcd 2347 happens and we pull out our precious hair from our bald skulls.
For LaTeX there is a separate file for each font (ok, three files), and there are files for each document style. This also means that you can carve that into different sets - you will probably not need fonts and document styles for any and all languages on the planet and every publisher / university / edge case. One file (or maybe one subdirectory) for each LaTeX package / class / font info. Modularity. Oh, and also human readable, easy to fork into your own package / class, easy to extend. Yes, the not-so-recent transition in handling fonts (a decade or so ago?) broke a lot of stuff, but those changes do not happen at a high rate. So in some cases it does make a lot of sense to have all those things separated out.
Oh, and an alternative would be to build one supermassive executable that contains all the stuff from those 374 files. Not sure if that makes more sense...
I agree that having all of those files in one flatsnappak is... suboptimal (or actually actively horrifying) - but then the "modern" way encourages you to bring in every dependency for every program separately. Remember what happened when computer games all came with their own DirectX (ActiveX?) library? *shudders*
flatsnappak certainly sounds like it should be some sort of Nordic snack food…
@b0llchit
Most of those 374 files are internationalised help files and language packs for a UN-worthy selection of languages. The actual executable is around 250Mb compared with 5Gb+ for a full texlive install.
I imagine most users would be installing the main executable plus a much smaller selection of the language files.
OA did make the point that many people are now finding the basic Office applications in Microsoft 365 and Google Apps good enough for the tasks they normally do. I have to raise my palsied fist in agreement with this point as *almost* everything I do at the current employer can be done fine in MS 360±2.
The main exceptions are decent mathematical equations and diagrams. To be honest I could probably use groff/eqn and export to eps for that then just insert them but I find Writer to be quicker and easier.
> The main exceptions are decent mathematical equations and diagrams. To be honest I could probably use groff/eqn and export to eps for that then just insert them but I find Writer to be quicker and easier.
Just found this web app after reading your post. Actually rather neat (especially if you know a little LaTeX). Export to svg, pdf, png, etc.
I'm sure that many companies don't care if their employees are putting sensitive and mission-critical information in docs "in the cloud" through any of the many office tools available. What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure any hackers who get into their data won't do anything bad, such as sell their plans and data to their competitors.</sarcasm>
But what about information that needs to not only be held securely, but must be *provably* held securely? Such as work by government agencies, law enforcement and legal work where an accusation of unauthorized information disclosure can have serious repercussions whether or the disclosures actually happened.
Dropping LibreOffice support and development means they are deprecating the desktop. Sad.
I don't see the sky falling here for friends of local LibreOffice (like me).
Recall this was about RHEL, which ships pre-obsoleted versions of everything. If you want an up-to-date LibreOffice, installing it from RPMs is no big deal (or from Flatpacks I guess, a technology I have so far never tried). I used to run CentOS and always had to do this upgrade to get a sensible version. (Now I run more up-to-date to date distros on desktop).
this was about RHEL, which ships pre-obsoleted versions of everything. If you want an up-to-date LibreOffice, installing it from RPMs is no big deal
The term is "stable" and it sure comes in handy when your version of RHEL is getting old in the tooth, upstream has completely dropped/broken support for running on your version of... everything.
For example... you need very, very old versions of TorBrowser (9.5.3, vs today's 11.5.8) to run on RHEL-7, yet the platform is still supported by RedHat for another year, yet. An even bigger deal back in the RHEL-5 days when Firefox switched from GTK2 to GTK3, completely abandoning a big bunch of customers, and RHEL had to backport Firefox to keep their users updated.
And this isn't just about RHEL, it's also about Fedora, which is certainly up-to-date and not at all obsolete. This is RedHat abandoning the desktop and trying to force everyone to accept a web-based / ChromeOS future, because it's less work for them. Now, maybe the desktop just isn't profitable enough to be worth the effort for them, but I hope this isn't another CentOS type miscalculation that's going to have see a flood of people fleeing from the RHEL ecosystem again.
"But what about information that needs to not only be held securely, but must be *provably* held securely? Such as work by government agencies, law enforcement and legal work where an accusation of unauthorized information disclosure can have serious repercussions whether or the disclosures actually happened."
Nope, even that stuff is getting moved to the cloud.
And there's a plausible argument in favor of it, honestly. If there are 10,000 companies that need secure information storage, it arguably makes more sense for them all to outsource that work to one of a handful of companies that specialize in providing secure information storage, rather than every one of those 10,000 companies coming up with its own system for secure information storage.
This, after all, is why these days in the *physical* world a lot of companies don't keep reams of files in a large physical office any more; if they need to store or safely dispose of physical files, they call Iron Mountain or one of its competitors. Logically speaking it makes more sense for a handful of document storage companies to be good at securely storing/disposing of documents for everyone than for everyone to work out their own document storage/disposal system.
The companies/government bodies just need to be sufficiently convinced that the external company is at least as good as (or preferably better than) they are themselves at doing the work. Given the state of IT at a lot of companies that's probably not a very high bar to clear. This is also exactly why all the cloud companies have been working on security standards compliance and the ability to specify where in the world your data will be stored and all the rest of it.
And there's a plausible argument in favor of it, honestly. If there are 10,000 companies that need secure information storage, it arguably makes more sense for them all to outsource that work to one of a handful of companies that specialize in providing secure information storage, rather than every one of those 10,000 companies coming up with its own system for secure information storage.
Plausible? Yes. Conclusive? I am not convinced.
Firstly, if you have a smaller number of systems, even if each of them is individually less likely to be hacked or fail, the consequences of one doing so are greater.
It will usually increase the attack surface. An internal system may only be accessible from the local network, or the corporate VPN. A more centralised system will usually work over the public internet. Most big security breaches these days seem to be of systems accessible over the public internet, that do not need to be - including things such as databases in the cloud that only a few people need to access directly.
There is also the complexity added by systems - configuring things like AWS permissions is horrible and creates a lot of room for human error. Of course its not the providers fault, but it is inevitable.
Given the state of IT at a lot of companies that's probably not a very high bar to clear.
True, but:
1. the same internal IT have to get these things properly specified and configured. We are just changing the required skill set from knowing OS and network security etc. to how to set up whatever providers systems.
2. there is no bar so low I would trust the giants of IT to fail to limbo under into.
This is also exactly why all the cloud companies have been working on security standards compliance and the ability to specify where in the world your data will be stored and all the rest of it.
The problem with security standards is that they easily become box ticking exercises.
With cloud stuff everyone can blame someone else and no one has their job on the line if they mess up.
>> I'm sure that many companies don't care if their employees are putting sensitive and mission-critical information in docs "in the cloud" through any of the many office tools available. What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure any hackers who get into their data won't do anything bad, such as sell their plans and data to their competitors.</sarcasm>
Out in the real world, for business which aren't itself online services, it's often badly secured on-premises which tends to get hacked to exfiltrate sensitive information.
Also, Google (and I believe AWS and even Microsoft Azure as well) are accredited to store sensitive information including various government classification levels. Also, Google has one of the best security teams in the world, and after being hacked badly back in 2010 (after which they created this team) has actually been very good at security (Microsoft, on the other hand...*cough* OMIGOD *cough*)
>> Dropping LibreOffice support and development means they are deprecating the desktop. Sad.
That's nonsense. What it means is that they no longer maintain copies of packages of a software which (as the article already explained) is readily downloadable from the LibreOffice website. Which has been the main course of action since the distro-maintained packages are usually outdated anyways.
Yet another article waxing poetic about how people don't need any actually good programs and tools to do their work.
Oh some shoddy, slow, barely functional web based piece of garbage is all anyone needs.
Sorry but if you want to actually have good productivity you need good software and usually that means fully featured programs often running locally.
A good example is how much more productive you can be using a full version of Microsoft Outlook as opposed to relying on something like Gmail in a web browser.
>> The thing is, the web-based office suites are at least as good as LibreOffice. If you need something better than the web-based stuff, you probably need to buy MS Office.
This is certainly true, but also if you really need Microsoft Office then it might also be time to consider if the kludge of 3rd party MS Office plugins or those huge Excel spreadsheets containing truckloads of data which should really be stored in a proper database or other suitable application is really such a good idea.
"web-based office suites are at least as good as LibreOffice", Collabora Online which uses LibreOffice technology is as good as LibreOffice in many regards.
MS 365 web based Office lacks heaps of features in comparison, see: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office
>> A good example is how much more productive you can be using a full version of Microsoft Outlook as opposed to relying on something like Gmail in a web browser.
Is this satire? Outlook (the steaming pile of garbage that doesn't even have a working search function) is the direct opposite of "productive".
Outlook is the perfect tool for performative working.
A good example is how much more productive you can be using a full version of Microsoft Outlook
I'd hate to see what you think a bad example is.
I've been using Microsoft Outhouse (yes, the real thing, not "Express" or whatever it's called) for over two decades, and what it's consistently been productive of is a stream of invective. If there's something Outlook does well, I've not found it.
Hell, just replying to and immediately deleting an email soft-fails about 80% of the time, generating a local conflict. Presumably that's because Outlook wants to update the original email to add the metadata about having replied, and it wants to move it to "Deleted Items", and it can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
These days and fairly counter intuitively you want to try to rely on projects with the *least* commercial backing possible. Less risk of arbitrary cost reductions and a better chance of lifespan.
I suspect that far less people actually need commercial support contracts than they think too.
The industry is completely upside down and broken.
Also, LibreOffice creeps me out. Their relationship with their partners is too close. They will try to move you to the Collabora Online cloud in any way possible. Perhaps RHEL was just sick of maintaining the "Community Edition" of LO (including that tacky banner) on their own.
This might be my tin foil hat speaking but you see some unreasonably passionate people in the LO vs OOo debate/argument and I just wonder if this is simply LO's maximum market penetration strategy at work in order to aid their monetization efforts.
You mean just like MS tries to do with Orifice?
Well F the lot of them. I measured my use of LibreOffice last month. 43% of the time, I was NOT connected to the internet. Ok, so much of that time was due to my phone deal not allowing me to run a hotspot outside the UK without racking up huge charges and being in a not-spot in the part of the Haute Loire department in France.
All this cloudy push means that your documents are no longer yours. They effectively belong to the cloud provider. If you stop paying then tough. Those docs are gone.
Is LibreOffice perfect? No way but there is more than enough there for me to write 3 novels in the past two years and 6 since the advent of COVID. None of those files went anywhere but my local backups until I was ready to publish them.
LibreOffice isn't the best thing ever to write a book in, but it actually seems to be the best thing that currently exists!
Word fell over with the large (publication quality) images, and likes to throw things around in the formatting, as well as still having bugs I recall from my desk job days, 20 years ago!
OpenOffice are idiots. I reported one massive issue with a fix, and they deleted the report as well as the work around (it won't/wouldn't hold more than about 10 images in slides before it got confused and started to randomly swap them around!
Google Docs? Sadly lacking in features.
So yes, LibreOffice are the current winners. And, what a world we live in - it is free and legal.
>>LibreOffice isn't the best thing ever to write a book in, but it actually seems to be the best thing that currently exists!
It's not by a long shot. Softmaker Office does pretty much everything better than LibreOffice, including handling the inevitable .doc and .docx files one gets, and it does so with a modern UX.
Then of course there are Google Apps (which have replaced MS Office in many businesses), and if you have a Mac then you also got Apple Pages, Numbers and Keynote, all free and while the UI is slightly quirky once you get your head around they cover the majority of use cases not just fine but also better than LO.
>>Google Docs? Sadly lacking in features.
So what features do you miss in Google Docs?
Debian also packages LibreOffice but the current version there, as I assume is also the case with RHEL, is quite old. A quick trip to https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/ brings a choice of the Business Edition and Community editions.
The Community edition comes in the advanced ("If you're a technology enthusiast, early adopter or power user, this version is for you!") and more conservative "This version is slightly older and does not have the latest features, but it has been tested for longer.") versions, currently 7.5.3 and 7.4.7. For each of those there's a choice of 64-bit Linux, DEB & RPM packaged as .tgz; Mac, Intel & Apple; and Windows, 32 & 64-bit. For each of these there's the language and help packs for your preferred language.
The DEBs install or update in /opt with any library files they need, with integration into the KDE or Gnome desktop and without fuss. It's an arrangement that Just Works. This is the established solution to the problem that Flatpak, Snap etc unnecessarily set out to solve.
It would be useful if DEBs could be kept in either Debian's contrib repository or in a Debian-style repository of LO's own so they can be updated by apt. I assume the RPMs could be dealt with similarly.
Perhaps this move by RH will prompt LO to set up suitable repositories.
"one massive incomprehensible pile of ancient rotting C++ and Java code, dragged along over 38 years [since] StarOffice."
I was intrigued about this so I took a quick look at what's installed in /opt/libreoffice7.4
ls -lR|wc -l gives 20338 files. Wow, even taking into account that some of these will just be noise such as directory names it seems a lot. But wait:
In the help directory that command gives 9022 files. IOW nearly 45% is mostly a mixture of html (2569)*, png (211) and svg (5089) of which the html represents stuff that needs language translation.
In the share directory there's even more files, 9916, or nearly 50%, which comprise all sorts of data files including fonts, templates and more
The program directory which includes most of that C++, Java and Python comes to just 1337 files of which 591 are .py files which seem to be just straight python 3.8.16 library files. This isn't to say that there aren't a few jars and pys scattered elsewhere.
There are also 751 xml & xsl files around the place which outnumber the total .jars (282) plus .so files (245 including a few .so.1 etc). (.x[sm]l and .jar counted across the whole installation, .so in /program.)
All-in-all there's little scope for localisation to a particular Linux distro and it certainly doesn't look like a massive pile of C++ and Java, rotting or otherwise. It's not surprising that the download site can get by with just a DEB and an RPM option for Linux.
* For specific file types the counts are filtered for the appropriate file name endings which should eliminate the noise.
"one massive incomprehensible pile of ancient rotting C++ and Java code, dragged along over 38 years [since] StarOffice."
Apart from (presumably) the Java part, a similar description is probably also pretty much equally applicable to the other monstrous beast known as Microsoft Office…
(1) There is MUCH more money to be had from network fees and "subscriptions"......
(2) ....So that means "cloud"..............
(3) ....Compared with letting the end-point user have any control over local data and end-point applications
So the big picture looks like this:
(4) End users get a browser and a broadband connection and lots of subscription services ($$$ for broadband and mobile providers, $$$ for "cloud" providers)
(5) End users CEASE TO GET end-point applications
(6) End users CEASE TO GET access to end-point storage of THEIR OWN DATA (see also item #4)
.....so increasing centralisation of IT services in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of larger and larger corporations.
Other effects:
(7) The increasing impossibility of buying ANYTHING without a credit card or a smartphone (see also item #4)...never mind that twentieth century concept....cash!
(8) The increasing impossibility of any personal privacy
Yup.........LibreOffice is just a tiny whisper of things to come!!!
P.S. See the news today in El Reg about Intuit and Quickbooks for more of the same......................
> much more convenient. You don't need to worry about what shared drive it's saved on, or how you connect to it.
Company moving to cloud has made this much worse for me.
In the shared folders (MS Office land, btw) people would attach or upload them to chats or emails because access is a known issue.
Now everything links out to SharePoint Online where "you must request access" - which is very much shouting into the ether it seems because nobody ever, ever responds.
Back to the original linker: "can you grant me access"
"No"
"Can you tell me who can?"
"No"
"Can you just attach the document please?"
"Attached"
Only that all now takes a week plus, because cloud access is so convenient.
/Rant
Active collaboration is much easier though, but I do that much, much less.
Projects on Flathub are generally more current and better maintained than distro packages.. Yeah it will use more space but it decreases the distro image size. Especially for those that use a different suite like only office or 0365 or Google docs.
I know a lot of people don't like them but I just assume have most UI applications distributed via flathub or app image downloads.
Yes, indeed back when I used gentoo, the two packages that were so large they were like "you know what? Maybe you *don't* want to build this one from source" (and had the option to install a pre-built binary package) were firefox and libreoffice, and libreoffice was by far the larger of the two. That thing would take all day to build!
I imagine document creation might come down knocking up one's more lucid ideas in a text editor and passing it to ChatGPT with a request to make it pretty for the boss, punters or the fish wrapping media.
In reverse throw the somewhat less lucid ravings of said boss, punters and media to ChatGPT with the request 'what does this tripe boil down to?"
ChatGPT has got manglement-speak shite down to a T. Just ask it to construct (or is that concoct?) an business case for your enterprise's procurement of the new Apple Vision Pro. I can see a few corporate job descriptions disappearing. Manglement will have to dream up new sinecures for their totties or just replace them with the newly acquired corporate Vision Pros :)
Perhaps, just perhaps, Red Hat is tired of waiting twenty-four years ("...It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. "Wikipedia") for simple compatibility; for readability and compatibility by everyone and everyone's word processor.
If you're writing a novel, a doctoral dissertation, a legal document, a résumé, an employment application, a general letter to a general (big. or small; doesn't much matter) business which you want read.., you had better use Microsoft's Word or Office.
OK; then don't. You stand an extremely good chance of being completely ignored.
The only thing which LibreOffice has going for it is that is big. No, make that huge. This impresses the Dunning-Kruger types of the world, as well as all those who equate having the latest, greatest, biggest, fastest piece of technology as absolute evidence of "being with it".
There exists a technical venue which has been in business for nineteen years, which used to headline every new release of LO, and garner a lot of clicks and comments. They do NOT do that any more. The comments were getting too embarrassing.
Twenty-four years. TWENTY-FOUR YEARS !
Still waiting for a miracle.
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