Office software

[azangru]

I believe that they were unbundled because of competitor's in the Office marketplace brought suit for anti-competitive practices.

I wonder why bundling LibreOffice with Ubuntu doesn't make it anticompetitive

[cwsnyder]

Simply because nobody is paying for either OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, and the reason for the bundling is that LibreOffice is released under GPL, as most of Linux (including the Kernel) is, while OpenOffice is now released under Apache license and was released under an even more restrictive license. Politics.

[Bucky Ball]

The fact that Openoffice, and for that matter Evolution, both of which used to be defaults, are both a nightmare to install now could be considered to make Ubuntu, Evolution or Openoffice anti-competitive, perhaps to the detriment of each other. Not sure how you would unravel that one ...

My wife refuses to use 12.04 because of the state of Openoffice and Evolution in it, both of which she's been using since 8.04 LTS and beyond. They are now c**p and barely an option, unless you fancy jumping through hoops attempting to tweak it to functionality. And failing, as I have. Don't have that time to waste.

[cwsnyder]

@Bucky Ball: When you aren't on the mailing lists, some changes come as a surprise. When a package is 'deprecated' and most of the maintainers agree, no one bothers to keep the packages and dependencies straight.

As an example: I have been trying for some time to 'fix' a problem which has bitten me in Bodhi Linux (which I keep in a VirtualBox guest to keep track of how it works) and it looks like several others here. Xrandr only returns a value of default when queried by entering xrandr by itself to identify what value to enter as the display to address to fix a problem when your installation does not fully use the maximum resolution of your display. When that shows up, I just discovered that it may be because the full package x11-xserver-utils is not installed, which now includes xgamma, which is required to set the display gamma setting, required when your display EDID is inadequately read. If you don't have the right dependencies, which full dependencies may have broken, then you may never fix the requirements to install your wanted package.

[Bucky Ball]

Sorry, I don't follow how this relates to what I mentioned about Openoffice and Evolution ...

[mastablasta]

...Exporting as PDF works fine, but no editing is a huge problem when you are involved in a collaborative process.

editing of PDF is done in Libre office Draw. but it is not so good.

what about IBM Lotus Symphony ?

[cwsnyder]

Sorry, I don't follow how this relates to what I mentioned about Openoffice and Evolution ...

The package maintainers are no longer maintaining all of the updates on the OpenOffice and Evolution packages, instead they are encouraging you to use LibreOffice. The reason why OpenOffice & Evolution are such a bear to add to your installation may be because some dependencies are 'left out' or not properly included in the build when the dependencies are updated to make sure they work properly with the rest of the system.

[forrestcupp]

Then save in MSO 2003, everyone with MSO should be able to open and edit them.Why go to an even more restricted format unnecessarily and then complain that LO doesn't have good compatibility? It is not really LO's responsibility to be compatible with MircoSoft's closed formats.

That's exactly what I do. I save everything as .doc and .xls. And it kind of is LO's responsibility to be compatible, because they've taken that responsibility upon themselves. I'm definitely not saying it's their fault. They've done a great job with what they have to work with. But the truth is that the xml format compatibility just isn't up to par.

That's probably true. Do you remember when MS Office was given away for free when you bought Windows?

I've bought every desktop version of Windows from 3.11 to Win7, and it never once came with MS Office. In fact, I went a long time without ever using Office because it was so expensive. If you were lucky, maybe you bought a higher-end PC that was bundled with Office, but you paid a premium for it. Maybe you're thinking of MS Works. For a long time, about every PC you bought had Works on it.

what about IBM Lotus Symphony ?

Symphony is pretty nice in some ways, but there are some things I just don't like about it. Mainly that every part of Symphony uses the same window.

[samsom63]

editing of PDF is done in Libre office Draw. but it is not so good.

what about IBM Lotus Symphony ?

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try