Office: Libre or Open

[Hagar Delest]

As of now OOo is gathering dust in the ASF "incubator" while Libre development continues.

There are so much bugs and regressions in LibO that it would be hard for companies to install it.

[WorMzy]

No it wouldn't.

sudo apt-get install libreoffice

Done.

[Hagar Delest]

That's the easy part, sure (assuming that they run a debian based OS).
Next step would be to face users rants (I remember threads in the LibO mailing list from LibO users wondering how the latest version made through with the regressions that were still not fixed).

[vasa1]

That's the easy part, sure (assuming that they run a debian based OS).
Next step would be to face users rants (I remember threads in the LibO mailing list from LibO users wondering how the latest version made through with the regressions that were still not fixed).

User rants are fashionable. They are everywhere.

[ofnuts]

Ok, the summary is: LO may be a bit more up-to-date, but it may be buggy. Ideally I would keep my old OO version around for a while. Can they coexist (I'll assume oowrite is renamed lowrite, etc)?

[prodigy_]

There are so much bugs and regressions in LibO that it would be hard for companies to install it.

I haven't encountered any bugs in Libre 3.4 but if it doesn't work for you, you can stick to 3.3.

[Hagar Delest]

Ideally I would keep my old OO version around for a while. Can they coexist

Of course they can coexist if you install them from their web site, not from the Ubuntu repos.

[Slim Odds]

The ASF may believe whatever they want but Linux distos have switched to Libre already and Windows users have no reason to not follow suit since Libre can handle more MS OFfice formats anyway.

As of now OOo is gathering dust in the ASF "incubator" while Libre development continues.

The main reason that some Linux distros switched was the acquisition of OOo by Oracle which many feared would mean trouble for OOo. Since then Oracle has turned over OOo to the ASF. So the playing field has changed significantly and it remains to be seem what becomes of OOo development.

[lykwydchykyn]

The "openoffice.org" in the Ubuntu (or Debian, or Fedora, or Suse, etc) repositories was *NOT* vanilla OpenOffice.org from Sun/Oracle. Hasn't been for years.

It was go-oo, which was a heavily patched version of OpenOffice from a community project sponsored by Novell.

It may have been called OpenOffice.org, may have been branded as OpenOffice.org, but be assured it was go-oo.

It also had Debian patches.

When LibreOffice forked, the go-oo patches were one of the first things to be merged into the new code base. Debian, Red Hat, and other distro patches were also among the first things. The go-oo project and community were folded into LibreOffice.


What this means is that, in terms of actual code, LibreOffice is far closer to the OpenOffice.org you have been using than the OpenOffice.org from Sun/Oracle/Apache.

Yes, the branding has changed, and the name. And 3.4 has added a few new features. But from the standpoint of actual code, the change is minor for those using default Ubuntu packages.

[test488]

I'm new to ubuntu, which do you recommend open office or libre office?