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Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
I guess Fedora users are supposed to use flatpak from now on. Between this and the recent VAAPI controversy Fedora starts to lose some of that shine that made it appealing for me for many years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API I wonder why way smaller distributions are fine with maintaining LibreOffice, but Red Hat supposedly doesn't have enough resources to keep it going.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  I think you’re confusing packaging and maintaining. Red Hat helps maintain the Linux port, as in actually paying people to keep it supporting Linux, vs just packaging it and keeping the package up to date.
- freedomben 3y ago
  On the VAAPI thing, do you disagree with their legal analysis? Do you think they can ship patent-encumbered algorithms? I think it sucks, but it would suck far more to see Fedora/Red Hat hit with legal challenges over it. It's also not usually a huge deal. This is the sort of thing that RPM Fusion has been great for many years.
  - dralley 3y ago
    SUSE also followed suit with VAAPI, so apparently their legal team doesn't disagree.
bipson 3y ago
I think most commenters on lwn are misunderstanding this gravely. RHEL not supporting LibreOffice doesn't mean you can still install it, right? It just means RH won't offer support for it? Also does not mean you must use Flatpak to use it, does it? Am I missing something? If it does make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. I also prefer efforts put on Wayland improvements, much closer to the OS itself and relevant to several use cases.
- rc_mob 3y ago
  then its a badly written headline
  - kbumsik 3y ago
    Well I think it still is a correct headline. In a linux distro, when it "support" a package means that you can contact its maintainers for help (bugs and etc) on the package. So the headline means that RHEL won't help you to install LibreOffice. There are always other way to install it though.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      Right but people generally do not install packages from just anywhere in corporate settings. I am sure there are a lot of places where either red hat packages the software or you don't get to use it. Not to mention, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to install an unsupported app like a compiler or mail/ldap/web server. And if something goes wrong and you're not using the supported version of the supported package, you don't get support. (Which is how it should be I think)
- psychphysic 3y ago
  > If it does not make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. This assumes companies don't make mistakes. They do. A lot. And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.
  - bipson 3y ago
    No, it doesn't. Something "making sense" does not mean mistakes are not possible. Assuming only idiots make mistakes is rather black-and-white.
  - creatonez 3y ago
    > And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes. Generally, RHEL does exactly what RHEL customers want. They are extremely loyal to their user base. The issues come when these changes set a trend and ripple to the rest of the community, and affect people who would never become a RH customer in the first place (e.g. anti-systemd fanatics)
hannob 3y ago
When IBM bought Red Hat this was the kind of thing I worried might happen: That Red Hat might stop supporting the Linux Desktop. I have no idea how their announcement makes any sense. They want to improve workstation experience by... not offering an office application any more? Like, what do you even mean by workstation?
- psychphysic 3y ago
  They are pivoting the work they do for workstations away from applications to HDR etc. That 'for' doesn't mean they are pivoting to Workstations. Guess it's a bit ambiguous, but anyways so libre office won't be a package on RHEL that's no big issue so long as the RPM and flatpak work fine.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    >that's no big issue so long as the RPM and flatpak work fine. // RH are no longer putting any effort into that, when they were doing before, so ... if RH are saving anything then LO will have more issues for RH users than it has up to now.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    HDR sounds like a nice excuse rather than a genuine reason...
    - George83728 3y ago
      Exactly, one has nothing to do with the other. Or maybe people think that the Red Hat employees presently tasked with packaging LibreOffice also happened to be graphics stack specialists with the experience needed to bring HDR to Linux. That seems unlikely to me.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Workstation usually means a high powered system for one user (at a time) where you would run things like CAD, 3D tools, mathematics or science software etc. So a focus on professional graphics features certainly makes sense. A (relatively) low powered system just for productivity software and web browsing would usually be called a desktop. At least some point there were actually different variants of RHEL for workstations and desktops. https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3772571 https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3772571
FeistySkink 3y ago
The Flatpak (Flathub) version works just fine and it is what I switched to using on Fedora for a while now, so I don't see an issue here. I'd rather the core OS would get more improvements.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Flathub is a single point of failure and flatpaks can also have security issues that go unfixed. Its not some kind of miracle from God or something
pk-protect-ai 3y ago
LibreOffice comes with its own support these days... RPMs are provided out of the box too. So it makes sense.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  That’s not what support means. Who can you call if you have a technical issue with LibreOffice? One possible answer used to be Red Hat if you had the entreprise version and a support contract.
  - miohtama 3y ago
    It would be simple matter of having two software support licenses. One for operating system and one for application. This is how most software works today. Red Hat knows if their customers are buying Red Hat license to get support for LibreOffice. I would assume this is a case only for very small number of customers, as Red Hat is mostly focusing on server product. And today companies can buy the same support from LibreOffice directly, so there is no point for Red Hat to compete against LibreOffice here. It's win win.
    - touisteur 3y ago
      Following this, does it mean they'll reduce the price for RH subscription? Just because one can buy support elsewhere (yay OSS - BTW who offers enterprise support for LibreOffice on RHEL I'm curious?) doesn't mean one can't be salty to have support for a major part of their subscription go away with no compensation.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        Current RHEL subs are still supported and will be until EOL, so nothing has been taken away. This is a change for future (yet unreleased) versions of RHEL
    - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
      I don’t think you can buy support from the Document Foundation, can you? Even then it would be vastly different than working with Red Hat/IBM. Most procurement offices probably wouldn’t be fine dealing with such a small partner. The fact is with Oracle and Red Hat having withdrawn, no serious company nowadays supports OpenOffice/LibreOffice. This part of the market which was already mostly dead when serious online solutions arrived is now pretty much officially buried.
29athrowaway 3y ago
FreeOffice is a superior alternative. Just not open source.
- louky 3y ago
  Thanks for that, I've haven't looked beyond Libre in years. Trying it out on Debian11 now.
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    Make sure to enable the HiDPI mode which is not the default for some reason.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  In what ways it it superior?
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    LibreOffice is a noble yet doomed project that tries to fix the unfixable: the incredibly slow, highly complicated and unaesthetic StarOffice originally developed by Sun, that later reincarnated in OpenOffice. Fixing that suite is so monumentally effort intensive that you would be better off rewriting it from scratch or porting features to a simpler suite like Abiword/Gnumeric, etc. FreeOffice is the free version of SoftMaker Office. A performant, visually pleasing office suite that is closer to the state of the art in office suites. Running it does not transform your computer into a heating system. Unlike WPS Office, another popular and free office suite (developed in China by KingSoft), SoftMaker is developed in the west by someone I can actually sue in a non kangaroo court in the EU if something goes wrong.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      Is LibreOffice really that slow? Sure, it takes a while to start up, but after that my experience has been that it's as performant as Microsoft Office or Google Docs (ie. pretty much instant for everything I've done with it). Just start it once and keep it running, and you won't really have to worry about performance. As for aesthetics, it looks fine to me... just like any other generic office app... besides which, aesthetics take a distant third place behind functionality and performance for me. As for suing, what are you doing that you have to even consider suing someone? That never even entered my mind for any software that I've ever used in my life.
boredemployee 3y ago
[flagged]
- tompandolfi 3y ago
  was this written by chatGPT ?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sysstemlord 3y ago
    Yes, and with a bad prompt also. It misses the point as if it's not possible to run Libre Office on RedHat anymore.
    - tentacleuno 3y ago
      Thanks for being honest.
      - sysstemlord 3y ago
        You're welcome but it makes me think that you think I'm the one who wrote it
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
How much have RH been contributing to LO? They warn that it's a lot of work. It would have been interesting to know how much ... is this a sign that RH can't afford to run their business? People are saying 'well, easy enough to install it from elsewhere' but surely the point is a major Linux company are no longer willing/able to support a principle business application. I'm assuming that support also included bug-fixes, packaging fixes, and such.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- davidgerard 3y ago
  They're one of the larger contributors in number of commits, about equal to Collabora.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- inefficient 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the reason has more to do with the number of users. I haven't used LO in some time, but back when I only used linux, I never found it to be a particularly pleasant experience. It definitely looks better now that I'm looking at it, but I switched to using google docs back at university. If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    >> If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation. A Linux distribution is more than the sum of its parts. Having out-of-the-box ability to read MS office docs is a huge deal. Nobody wants to fuck around installing something extra to read a defacto standard document format.
chrismorgan 3y ago
This LWN article makes the matter supremely confusing. The linked mailing list post is way better and clearer and it would be good to get this submission changed to it: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@mailman01.iad2.fedoraproject.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... Key excerpts: > … the LibreOffice RPMS have recently been orphaned … > … will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term. > Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMS in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  This is probably how things will be moving. It doesn't make sense for every single distro to maintain customized versions of user level applications now that we have one package that works everywhere.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Works everywhere is a stretch. Flatpaked applications have multiple issues
    - qbasic_forever 3y ago
      Bespoke RPMs that have to be patched and modified for distros by a small group of maintainers have issues too.
      - b112 3y ago
        Redhat is just falling. It was a pain doing packages 25 years ago, comparatively it is simple now. Frankly, the flatpak will have issues as well, but those will be outside of Redhat's direct control. Which means the end game, will be a redhat flatpak.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
I guess users would still be able to install common desktop and productivity applications via flatpak or snap. Is there much value to using rpms for this at this point? I know it's a sensitive topic to some people who just don't like any change unless its on their terms. But I think the reality is that with so many linux distributions around the job of packaging up software for those is a rather tedious and thankless one. Or in the case of IBM/Red Hat also one without a lot of revenue/profit opportunities. So, I can see why IBM would want to reduce the number of packages they have to worry about.
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
Flatpak will be the recommended way to get / install LibreOffice on RHEL and Fedora. In https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe... it states: "the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term." Install instructions are already written: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/administering_the_system_using_the_gnome_desktop_environment/assembly_installing-applications-using-flatpak_administering-the-system-using-the-gnome-desktop-environment https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... I would not be surprised if more desktop applications also go to Flatpak on future versions of RHEL. It lets them focus on more enterprise-y features and improve overall security.
- criddell 3y ago
  I think this is a small step in the right direction. IMHO, Flatpak (and similar schemes) with strict sandboxing should be the only distribution method for user applications. If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. If you want to give that application access to everything your user has access to, that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be the default.
  - redprince 3y ago
    > If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. This isn't some untrusted unauditable binary blob from a possibly shady manufacturer. Everything it will or will not do is right there for everyone to see in the published source code from which it is compiled and packaged. Furthermore nothing is fundamentally stopping anyone to apply SELinux policies to this application just like a flatpak would.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
trop 3y ago
The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is > We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing. [0]: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@mailman01.iad2.fedoraproject.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?
  - pnpnp 3y ago
    My vote would be replacing the dumpster fire that X currently is. Everyone would benefit from that.
  - dralley 3y ago
    The former has tons of plausible alternatives which are already more frequently used than LibreOffice - and of course you can still use LibreOffice via Flatpak anyways. The latter is a hard requirement to doing serious media editing work on Linux regardless of what software you want to use. And unlike the former, there's a dedicated customer base that wants it.
    - supportlocal4h 3y ago
      There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle. LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas. It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.
noobermin 3y ago
I get libreoffice is "bad" but the existence of alternatives online really drive home how it is not impossible to develop a modern office suite alternative to office. I honestly wish I could have a desktop tool again, I'm tired of giving the large IT corps more data they can train on. It's possible with some love. Blender did it, it is quickly becoming an accepted tool in 3D graphics circles, if not the standard.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  How is Libre Office bad exactly? It has always seemed like an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office to me. What don't you like about it?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Writing macros or whatever they are called is painful. Writing an application or macro in VBA is much simpler.
  - g8oz 3y ago
    Excel has raced ahead with LET()/LAMBDA() functionality and a JavaScript api. It seems that Libreoffice Calc has stood still in comparison (although to be fair it does feel more stable and responsive).
- gmiller123456 3y ago
  What makes it bad?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  How do the online suites handle word documents? IMO one of the problems with the LibreOffice/OpenOffice projects is that they took on an impossible challenge, working with Microsoft’s semi-documented mess of a file format. An office suite might not be hard, but Word is made of hacks and kludges, matching them is nearly impossible.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
jrm4 3y ago
On one hand, this is awfully clickbaity, it would be more fair to highlight the Wayland work. On the other; Wayland work? Also not impressive to flex stuff that should have worked a decade ago.
nologic01 3y ago
While this feels like just a delta in the scheme of things it sounds like it is a delta with the "wrong" sign. For ages now it is clear that the Linux desktop community has lost the plot of how to move forward in the era of "cloud" and "AI" even while its value proposition, intrinsic advantages and cumulated achievement are immense. There is fragmentation, duplication, silos, and lack of interoperability among the vast array of available open source desktop apps. And now there is AI knocking on the door. Of all the desktop apps Libreoffice is maybe the one that is exactly in the eye of the AI storm. Its pretty obvious that cloud "productivity" suites will be increasingly integrating these algorithms and new functionalities will completely subsume and/or obsolesce old paradigms. Libreoffice having access to local and sensitive data and a huge range of open source data science / ML libraries should have been at the forefront of integrating open source AI. Not only gaining a new lease of life for the next decade but enticing maybe many millions more users into FOSS platforms.
- nazgulsenpai 3y ago
  I don't understand the point you're making. Is it that Libreoffice should be training open source AI using my local sensitive data? Or that the future AI powered office suites won't be some sort of subscription based PWAs?
  - nologic01 3y ago
    libreoffice should make use of locally running open source AI that (optionally) has been fine-tuned (by the user) to local data. "AI" is just a proxy for a vast range of, e.g., Python or R or julia algorithms and libraries that libreoffice could already tap via extensions, scripting etc.
bee_rider 3y ago
WYSWYG office suites were a mistake. Combining the editing and the display compromises both. They seem destined to become giant unmaintainable monoliths. They solve problems that are fundamentally really hard but also incredibly boring, like making layout decisions on the fly. And finally they are just boring in a way that means nobody is really that interested in contributing. Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML are much better options if fancy text is really necessary. Often it is better to just do plain text though.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Office suites cover quite a bit more use cases than LaTeX or markdown. Civil clerks worldwide use Word daily to create dense forms for people to fill out. That is a major pain in the ass to achieve with the tools you mentioned; you basically need a developer on call to create a template for you. Office suites enable almost untrained users to achieve that autonomously. Excel empowered hordes of complete laymen to do basic programming and perform database queries. I don't like office suits either, but credit where credit's due.
  - JackSlateur 3y ago
    And that hordes of laymen, empowered by excel, flowed the world like a plague Haa, the fabulous "yes, this is our program, we wrote it in excel because macro because we can and do not know how to do better" if you never met it, you are lucky for being spared
    - wheelerof4te 3y ago
      I worked with a Office layman who couldn't (and did not care to learn how to) open RAR files. Yeah.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I think spreadsheets are great, I hadn’t thought to include them in with office suites, I mostly use GNUmeric.
schmorptron 3y ago
I don't think it's a big deal, and them going all-in on flatpak for user-facing GUI applications makes sense to me. If the resources freed up by this go towards improvements to the base OS and DE I think that's a good thing in the long run.
jmbwell 3y ago
FWIW and like it or not, libreoffice is the best or only way to do some of the things it does. I don’t actually use it directly as an office suite really ever. But I do use tools that use its libraries, like unoconv, or that depend on it for other things, like Nextcloud. It’s a beast and a burden, but if you need to deal with Office documents of unknown provenance, programmatically, it’s a valuable and relevant set of tools.
wmf 3y ago
Related blog post that's worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175655
ac2023 3y ago
Hardly related as this is more server-side, but it seems CentOS is getting a lot of traction with cloud companies these days. Microsoft also apparently going large scale with CentOS-based Azure Linux. The question is: What is the best solution going forward for desktop productivity software on Linux?
chriscappuccio 3y ago
Libreoffice has been a huge mess for years. It's unreliable garbage for anyone who is trying to work with documents from other people. It might be OK for composing stuff from scratch, that is until it crashes while you're in the middle of a document. I've never found it reliable under any OS. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, or what people actually reliably use it for
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  I recently used Libre Office Writer for developing professional-grade documentation. we had Word installed on our remote desktops, so I opened the document in Word just to compare how it looks like. I was horribly formatted and the fonts looked off. Then I saved the file in Word and opened it in LO Writer again. Even more issues.
tkuraku 3y ago
I usually uninstall libreoffice and install the up to date flatpak anyway. This seems like the smart thing to do.
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  LO in fedora is usually up-to-date version. I don't know the situation with RHEL.
  - tkuraku 3y ago
    Yeah, this is in reference to RHEL and friends. Generally the LO version is older.
shp0ngle 3y ago
People mention Google Docs a lot in this thread. There seem to be a server version of LibreOffice, called confusingly LibreOffice Online and Collabora Office (?) somewhat interchangeably; Collabora is the #1 contributor to LibreOffice. I cannot find a free online demo of that though, so I don't know how good it actually is. edit: there is also some confusing thing about maximum number of users, and if you want to remove it, you need to rename the server because of trademark? I don't know. Seems confusing https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
- nr11_bullseye 3y ago
  It's decent enough for me to use it instead of Google Docs but it definitely has it's limitations. While Google Docs seems to render things on the client side, Collabora Online renders everything on server side, which makes this uncomfortable to use with slow internet. While the feature set of Collabora Online is decent, there are some missing, for examples you can't insert/edit mathematical equations and there are no macros. Templates are supported but you have to create them externally and then upload them. I think it's good enough to write a few pages of text but it's not good enough for power users who write 100-page essays or use complex formatting.
ravenstine 3y ago
Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't see why Red Hat even should support LibreOffice. I still use LO sometimes to this day, particularly because it's offline-only, but it's hardly a paragon of software today. It hasn't meaningfully improved in a very long time, and it still looks clunky. I don't think it has much to do with the age of the software because Microsoft Office has always looked and felt nicer than LO and OO. At this point, someone just needs to be around to get it to compile for the latest operating systems. I can't imagine that interest in contributing to it has done anything but decline over the last decade. Focusing on Wayland makes way more sense. I don't see why LO can't be considered "good enough" and allow the community to compile it and fix bugs or exploits.
xvilka 3y ago
Time to ditch Fedora and migrate to Arch, I guess.
ape4 3y ago
Maybe this is a way of Red Hat promoting Flatpak?
greatgib 3y ago
If I was using RH and paying for their workstation support, I will be quite upset they stop providing first class support for libre Office that is one of the main usage for a workstation. Display color accuracy is a nice to have but I have hard time believing that it is what is the most important to their users. Also, they will look fine when they will have color accuracy and HDR on their workstation and that all their applications are not able to use that or displaying with wrong theme and bad performance because of being flat pack apps...
- GlacierFox 3y ago
  The vast majority of the visual effects industry uses RHEL / Alma for compositing , color correction and many more aspects of the pipeline. I'd expect this userbase is more substantial than people using RHEL for libre office.
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  How about this? RH will provide just the bare minimum of base OS and a bunch of devel-libraries to enable users who want to build their own software! It would be more in line with the intended audience, at least.
awill 3y ago
I don't really see the problem. I want the rock solid underpinnings of RHEL, and am ok with older kernels etc.., but I generally want updated apps like LibreOffice, Firefox etc.. To me it makes sense for those things to be Flatpak, and for you to just get them directly from the source. A Flatpak of LO maintained by LO, a flatpak of Firefox maintained by Firefox etc.. What's the problem with that?
- wheelerof4te 3y ago
  There is no problem with that. But it is just a simplified way of saying "Look! You can build your own software directly from the maintainers, but faster and much easier!" Basically, a glorified Gentoo way. We're back to square one.
  - awill 3y ago
    It's not really building anything. You would just download a few apps from flathub.org
    - wheelerof4te 3y ago
      I know, I was just being hyperbolic.
quink 3y ago
Flatpaks continue to horrify me because of fundamental stuff like this that keeps getting completely ignored: https://github.com/flathub/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice/issues/176#issuecomment-1525686681 https://github.com/flathub/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice/issue... I swear, Desktop Linux has continued to regress in a downwards spiral since Mac OS X was first released, so only for about the past two decades. I also love the “solutions” that are recommended for when this happens with basically every Flatpak out there. They’re all either 1. install this application to change your settings after your stuff is gone or invisible and remember to do it forever or 2. instead of that application simply type these 80 characters into Terminal. Linux Desktop is a parody of itself.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Dumb questions: To clarify, is libreOffice a red hat project? Does this mean the project needs a new maintainer? Or is this saying that the red hat distro is no longer ensuring compatibility (in favor of a different product?)? If they're just dropping support from the distro, what are they replacing it with?
- davidgerard 3y ago
  LO has a multi-vendor foundation, The Document Foundation. Red Hat has been a large contributor up to now, about as large a contributor as Collabora by commits. There are several other vendors and a lot of unaffiliated volunteer contributions.
clever-leap 3y ago
LibreOffice is such a bloatware that I migrated to SoftMaker office two years ago and never looked back.
davidgerard 3y ago
Caolan McNamara was one of the largest LO contributors at Red Hat, he's now moved to Collabora to keep doing the same stuff. https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2023-05-15-caolan.html https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2023-05-15-caolan.html
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I find it likely that the majority of people who pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are not using Libre Office? (and thus IBM/Redhat no longer wants to maintain it.) Does anyone know the ratio of "server" RHEL to "desktop" RHEL subscribers?
TZubiri 3y ago
Will it be replaced by some other office suite? As a non rhel user I don't get it
ninefathom 3y ago
And I'm sure there's zero chance that IBM will be releasing their own Linux office product- probably derived from LibreOffice, but with an additional support line item attached- in the very near future. Nope, no chance. //rolling my eyes into the back of my head//

I guess Fedora users are supposed to use flatpak from now on. Between this and the recent VAAPI controversy Fedora starts to lose some of that shine that made it appealing for me for many years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Disable-Bad-VA-API I wonder why way smaller distributions are fine with maintaining LibreOffice, but Red Hat supposedly doesn't have enough resources to keep it going.

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
I think you’re confusing packaging and maintaining. Red Hat helps maintain the Linux port, as in actually paying people to keep it supporting Linux, vs just packaging it and keeping the package up to date.
freedomben 3y ago
On the VAAPI thing, do you disagree with their legal analysis? Do you think they can ship patent-encumbered algorithms? I think it sucks, but it would suck far more to see Fedora/Red Hat hit with legal challenges over it. It's also not usually a huge deal. This is the sort of thing that RPM Fusion has been great for many years.
- dralley 3y ago
  SUSE also followed suit with VAAPI, so apparently their legal team doesn't disagree.

bipson 3y ago

I think most commenters on lwn are misunderstanding this gravely. RHEL not supporting LibreOffice doesn't mean you can still install it, right? It just means RH won't offer support for it? Also does not mean you must use Flatpak to use it, does it? Am I missing something? If it does make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. I also prefer efforts put on Wayland improvements, much closer to the OS itself and relevant to several use cases.

rc_mob 3y ago
then its a badly written headline
- kbumsik 3y ago
  Well I think it still is a correct headline. In a linux distro, when it "support" a package means that you can contact its maintainers for help (bugs and etc) on the package. So the headline means that RHEL won't help you to install LibreOffice. There are always other way to install it though.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    Right but people generally do not install packages from just anywhere in corporate settings. I am sure there are a lot of places where either red hat packages the software or you don't get to use it. Not to mention, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to install an unsupported app like a compiler or mail/ldap/web server. And if something goes wrong and you're not using the supported version of the supported package, you don't get support. (Which is how it should be I think)
psychphysic 3y ago
> If it does not make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. This assumes companies don't make mistakes. They do. A lot. And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.
- bipson 3y ago
  No, it doesn't. Something "making sense" does not mean mistakes are not possible. Assuming only idiots make mistakes is rather black-and-white.
- creatonez 3y ago
  > And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes. Generally, RHEL does exactly what RHEL customers want. They are extremely loyal to their user base. The issues come when these changes set a trend and ripple to the rest of the community, and affect people who would never become a RH customer in the first place (e.g. anti-systemd fanatics)

hannob 3y ago

When IBM bought Red Hat this was the kind of thing I worried might happen: That Red Hat might stop supporting the Linux Desktop. I have no idea how their announcement makes any sense. They want to improve workstation experience by... not offering an office application any more? Like, what do you even mean by workstation?

psychphysic 3y ago
They are pivoting the work they do for workstations away from applications to HDR etc. That 'for' doesn't mean they are pivoting to Workstations. Guess it's a bit ambiguous, but anyways so libre office won't be a package on RHEL that's no big issue so long as the RPM and flatpak work fine.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >that's no big issue so long as the RPM and flatpak work fine. // RH are no longer putting any effort into that, when they were doing before, so ... if RH are saving anything then LO will have more issues for RH users than it has up to now.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  HDR sounds like a nice excuse rather than a genuine reason...
  - George83728 3y ago
    Exactly, one has nothing to do with the other. Or maybe people think that the Red Hat employees presently tasked with packaging LibreOffice also happened to be graphics stack specialists with the experience needed to bring HDR to Linux. That seems unlikely to me.
steve1977 3y ago
Workstation usually means a high powered system for one user (at a time) where you would run things like CAD, 3D tools, mathematics or science software etc. So a focus on professional graphics features certainly makes sense. A (relatively) low powered system just for productivity software and web browsing would usually be called a desktop. At least some point there were actually different variants of RHEL for workstations and desktops. https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3772571 https://access.redhat.com/discussions/3772571

FeistySkink 3y ago

The Flatpak (Flathub) version works just fine and it is what I switched to using on Fedora for a while now, so I don't see an issue here. I'd rather the core OS would get more improvements.

ekianjo 3y ago
Flathub is a single point of failure and flatpaks can also have security issues that go unfixed. Its not some kind of miracle from God or something

pk-protect-ai 3y ago

LibreOffice comes with its own support these days... RPMs are provided out of the box too. So it makes sense.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
That’s not what support means. Who can you call if you have a technical issue with LibreOffice? One possible answer used to be Red Hat if you had the entreprise version and a support contract.
- miohtama 3y ago
  It would be simple matter of having two software support licenses. One for operating system and one for application. This is how most software works today. Red Hat knows if their customers are buying Red Hat license to get support for LibreOffice. I would assume this is a case only for very small number of customers, as Red Hat is mostly focusing on server product. And today companies can buy the same support from LibreOffice directly, so there is no point for Red Hat to compete against LibreOffice here. It's win win.
  - touisteur 3y ago
    Following this, does it mean they'll reduce the price for RH subscription? Just because one can buy support elsewhere (yay OSS - BTW who offers enterprise support for LibreOffice on RHEL I'm curious?) doesn't mean one can't be salty to have support for a major part of their subscription go away with no compensation.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Current RHEL subs are still supported and will be until EOL, so nothing has been taken away. This is a change for future (yet unreleased) versions of RHEL
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    I don’t think you can buy support from the Document Foundation, can you? Even then it would be vastly different than working with Red Hat/IBM. Most procurement offices probably wouldn’t be fine dealing with such a small partner. The fact is with Oracle and Red Hat having withdrawn, no serious company nowadays supports OpenOffice/LibreOffice. This part of the market which was already mostly dead when serious online solutions arrived is now pretty much officially buried.

29athrowaway 3y ago

FreeOffice is a superior alternative. Just not open source.

louky 3y ago
Thanks for that, I've haven't looked beyond Libre in years. Trying it out on Debian11 now.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Make sure to enable the HiDPI mode which is not the default for some reason.
pmoriarty 3y ago
In what ways it it superior?
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  LibreOffice is a noble yet doomed project that tries to fix the unfixable: the incredibly slow, highly complicated and unaesthetic StarOffice originally developed by Sun, that later reincarnated in OpenOffice. Fixing that suite is so monumentally effort intensive that you would be better off rewriting it from scratch or porting features to a simpler suite like Abiword/Gnumeric, etc. FreeOffice is the free version of SoftMaker Office. A performant, visually pleasing office suite that is closer to the state of the art in office suites. Running it does not transform your computer into a heating system. Unlike WPS Office, another popular and free office suite (developed in China by KingSoft), SoftMaker is developed in the west by someone I can actually sue in a non kangaroo court in the EU if something goes wrong.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    Is LibreOffice really that slow? Sure, it takes a while to start up, but after that my experience has been that it's as performant as Microsoft Office or Google Docs (ie. pretty much instant for everything I've done with it). Just start it once and keep it running, and you won't really have to worry about performance. As for aesthetics, it looks fine to me... just like any other generic office app... besides which, aesthetics take a distant third place behind functionality and performance for me. As for suing, what are you doing that you have to even consider suing someone? That never even entered my mind for any software that I've ever used in my life.

boredemployee 3y ago

[flagged]

tompandolfi 3y ago
was this written by chatGPT ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sysstemlord 3y ago
  Yes, and with a bad prompt also. It misses the point as if it's not possible to run Libre Office on RedHat anymore.
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    Thanks for being honest.
    - sysstemlord 3y ago
      You're welcome but it makes me think that you think I'm the one who wrote it

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

How much have RH been contributing to LO? They warn that it's a lot of work. It would have been interesting to know how much ... is this a sign that RH can't afford to run their business? People are saying 'well, easy enough to install it from elsewhere' but surely the point is a major Linux company are no longer willing/able to support a principle business application. I'm assuming that support also included bug-fixes, packaging fixes, and such.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
davidgerard 3y ago
They're one of the larger contributors in number of commits, about equal to Collabora.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
inefficient 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason has more to do with the number of users. I haven't used LO in some time, but back when I only used linux, I never found it to be a particularly pleasant experience. It definitely looks better now that I'm looking at it, but I switched to using google docs back at university. If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation. A Linux distribution is more than the sum of its parts. Having out-of-the-box ability to read MS office docs is a huge deal. Nobody wants to fuck around installing something extra to read a defacto standard document format.

chrismorgan 3y ago

This LWN article makes the matter supremely confusing. The linked mailing list post is way better and clearer and it would be good to get this submission changed to it: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@mailman01.iad2.fedoraproject.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... Key excerpts: > … the LibreOffice RPMS have recently been orphaned … > … will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term. > Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMS in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.

Gigachad 3y ago
This is probably how things will be moving. It doesn't make sense for every single distro to maintain customized versions of user level applications now that we have one package that works everywhere.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Works everywhere is a stretch. Flatpaked applications have multiple issues
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    Bespoke RPMs that have to be patched and modified for distros by a small group of maintainers have issues too.
    - b112 3y ago
      Redhat is just falling. It was a pain doing packages 25 years ago, comparatively it is simple now. Frankly, the flatpak will have issues as well, but those will be outside of Redhat's direct control. Which means the end game, will be a redhat flatpak.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

I guess users would still be able to install common desktop and productivity applications via flatpak or snap. Is there much value to using rpms for this at this point? I know it's a sensitive topic to some people who just don't like any change unless its on their terms. But I think the reality is that with so many linux distributions around the job of packaging up software for those is a rather tedious and thankless one. Or in the case of IBM/Red Hat also one without a lot of revenue/profit opportunities. So, I can see why IBM would want to reduce the number of packages they have to worry about.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

Flatpak will be the recommended way to get / install LibreOffice on RHEL and Fedora. In https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe... it states: "the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term." Install instructions are already written: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/administering_the_system_using_the_gnome_desktop_environment/assembly_installing-applications-using-flatpak_administering-the-system-using-the-gnome-desktop-environment https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... I would not be surprised if more desktop applications also go to Flatpak on future versions of RHEL. It lets them focus on more enterprise-y features and improve overall security.

criddell 3y ago
I think this is a small step in the right direction. IMHO, Flatpak (and similar schemes) with strict sandboxing should be the only distribution method for user applications. If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. If you want to give that application access to everything your user has access to, that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be the default.
- redprince 3y ago
  > If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. This isn't some untrusted unauditable binary blob from a possibly shady manufacturer. Everything it will or will not do is right there for everyone to see in the published source code from which it is compiled and packaged. Furthermore nothing is fundamentally stopping anyone to apply SELinux policies to this application just like a flatpak would.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

trop 3y ago

The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is > We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing. [0]: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@mailman01.iad2.fedoraproject.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

pmoriarty 3y ago
What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?
- pnpnp 3y ago
  My vote would be replacing the dumpster fire that X currently is. Everyone would benefit from that.
- dralley 3y ago
  The former has tons of plausible alternatives which are already more frequently used than LibreOffice - and of course you can still use LibreOffice via Flatpak anyways. The latter is a hard requirement to doing serious media editing work on Linux regardless of what software you want to use. And unlike the former, there's a dedicated customer base that wants it.
  - supportlocal4h 3y ago
    There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle. LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas. It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.

noobermin 3y ago

I get libreoffice is "bad" but the existence of alternatives online really drive home how it is not impossible to develop a modern office suite alternative to office. I honestly wish I could have a desktop tool again, I'm tired of giving the large IT corps more data they can train on. It's possible with some love. Blender did it, it is quickly becoming an accepted tool in 3D graphics circles, if not the standard.

pmoriarty 3y ago
How is Libre Office bad exactly? It has always seemed like an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office to me. What don't you like about it?
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Writing macros or whatever they are called is painful. Writing an application or macro in VBA is much simpler.
- g8oz 3y ago
  Excel has raced ahead with LET()/LAMBDA() functionality and a JavaScript api. It seems that Libreoffice Calc has stood still in comparison (although to be fair it does feel more stable and responsive).
gmiller123456 3y ago
What makes it bad?
bee_rider 3y ago
How do the online suites handle word documents? IMO one of the problems with the LibreOffice/OpenOffice projects is that they took on an impossible challenge, working with Microsoft’s semi-documented mess of a file format. An office suite might not be hard, but Word is made of hacks and kludges, matching them is nearly impossible.
- SanderNL 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago

On one hand, this is awfully clickbaity, it would be more fair to highlight the Wayland work. On the other; Wayland work? Also not impressive to flex stuff that should have worked a decade ago.

nologic01 3y ago

While this feels like just a delta in the scheme of things it sounds like it is a delta with the "wrong" sign. For ages now it is clear that the Linux desktop community has lost the plot of how to move forward in the era of "cloud" and "AI" even while its value proposition, intrinsic advantages and cumulated achievement are immense. There is fragmentation, duplication, silos, and lack of interoperability among the vast array of available open source desktop apps. And now there is AI knocking on the door. Of all the desktop apps Libreoffice is maybe the one that is exactly in the eye of the AI storm. Its pretty obvious that cloud "productivity" suites will be increasingly integrating these algorithms and new functionalities will completely subsume and/or obsolesce old paradigms. Libreoffice having access to local and sensitive data and a huge range of open source data science / ML libraries should have been at the forefront of integrating open source AI. Not only gaining a new lease of life for the next decade but enticing maybe many millions more users into FOSS platforms.

nazgulsenpai 3y ago
I don't understand the point you're making. Is it that Libreoffice should be training open source AI using my local sensitive data? Or that the future AI powered office suites won't be some sort of subscription based PWAs?
- nologic01 3y ago
  libreoffice should make use of locally running open source AI that (optionally) has been fine-tuned (by the user) to local data. "AI" is just a proxy for a vast range of, e.g., Python or R or julia algorithms and libraries that libreoffice could already tap via extensions, scripting etc.

bee_rider 3y ago

WYSWYG office suites were a mistake. Combining the editing and the display compromises both. They seem destined to become giant unmaintainable monoliths. They solve problems that are fundamentally really hard but also incredibly boring, like making layout decisions on the fly. And finally they are just boring in a way that means nobody is really that interested in contributing. Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML are much better options if fancy text is really necessary. Often it is better to just do plain text though.

mr_mitm 3y ago
Office suites cover quite a bit more use cases than LaTeX or markdown. Civil clerks worldwide use Word daily to create dense forms for people to fill out. That is a major pain in the ass to achieve with the tools you mentioned; you basically need a developer on call to create a template for you. Office suites enable almost untrained users to achieve that autonomously. Excel empowered hordes of complete laymen to do basic programming and perform database queries. I don't like office suits either, but credit where credit's due.
- JackSlateur 3y ago
  And that hordes of laymen, empowered by excel, flowed the world like a plague Haa, the fabulous "yes, this is our program, we wrote it in excel because macro because we can and do not know how to do better" if you never met it, you are lucky for being spared
  - wheelerof4te 3y ago
    I worked with a Office layman who couldn't (and did not care to learn how to) open RAR files. Yeah.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I think spreadsheets are great, I hadn’t thought to include them in with office suites, I mostly use GNUmeric.

schmorptron 3y ago

I don't think it's a big deal, and them going all-in on flatpak for user-facing GUI applications makes sense to me. If the resources freed up by this go towards improvements to the base OS and DE I think that's a good thing in the long run.

jmbwell 3y ago

FWIW and like it or not, libreoffice is the best or only way to do some of the things it does. I don’t actually use it directly as an office suite really ever. But I do use tools that use its libraries, like unoconv, or that depend on it for other things, like Nextcloud. It’s a beast and a burden, but if you need to deal with Office documents of unknown provenance, programmatically, it’s a valuable and relevant set of tools.

wmf 3y ago

Related blog post that's worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175655

ac2023 3y ago

Hardly related as this is more server-side, but it seems CentOS is getting a lot of traction with cloud companies these days. Microsoft also apparently going large scale with CentOS-based Azure Linux. The question is: What is the best solution going forward for desktop productivity software on Linux?

chriscappuccio 3y ago

Libreoffice has been a huge mess for years. It's unreliable garbage for anyone who is trying to work with documents from other people. It might be OK for composing stuff from scratch, that is until it crashes while you're in the middle of a document. I've never found it reliable under any OS. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, or what people actually reliably use it for

wheelerof4te 3y ago
I recently used Libre Office Writer for developing professional-grade documentation. we had Word installed on our remote desktops, so I opened the document in Word just to compare how it looks like. I was horribly formatted and the fonts looked off. Then I saved the file in Word and opened it in LO Writer again. Even more issues.

tkuraku 3y ago

I usually uninstall libreoffice and install the up to date flatpak anyway. This seems like the smart thing to do.

wheelerof4te 3y ago
LO in fedora is usually up-to-date version. I don't know the situation with RHEL.
- tkuraku 3y ago
  Yeah, this is in reference to RHEL and friends. Generally the LO version is older.

shp0ngle 3y ago

People mention Google Docs a lot in this thread. There seem to be a server version of LibreOffice, called confusingly LibreOffice Online and Collabora Office (?) somewhat interchangeably; Collabora is the #1 contributor to LibreOffice. I cannot find a free online demo of that though, so I don't know how good it actually is. edit: there is also some confusing thing about maximum number of users, and if you want to remove it, you need to rename the server because of trademark? I don't know. Seems confusing https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

nr11_bullseye 3y ago
It's decent enough for me to use it instead of Google Docs but it definitely has it's limitations. While Google Docs seems to render things on the client side, Collabora Online renders everything on server side, which makes this uncomfortable to use with slow internet. While the feature set of Collabora Online is decent, there are some missing, for examples you can't insert/edit mathematical equations and there are no macros. Templates are supported but you have to create them externally and then upload them. I think it's good enough to write a few pages of text but it's not good enough for power users who write 100-page essays or use complex formatting.

ravenstine 3y ago

Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't see why Red Hat even should support LibreOffice. I still use LO sometimes to this day, particularly because it's offline-only, but it's hardly a paragon of software today. It hasn't meaningfully improved in a very long time, and it still looks clunky. I don't think it has much to do with the age of the software because Microsoft Office has always looked and felt nicer than LO and OO. At this point, someone just needs to be around to get it to compile for the latest operating systems. I can't imagine that interest in contributing to it has done anything but decline over the last decade. Focusing on Wayland makes way more sense. I don't see why LO can't be considered "good enough" and allow the community to compile it and fix bugs or exploits.

xvilka 3y ago

Time to ditch Fedora and migrate to Arch, I guess.

ape4 3y ago

Maybe this is a way of Red Hat promoting Flatpak?

greatgib 3y ago

If I was using RH and paying for their workstation support, I will be quite upset they stop providing first class support for libre Office that is one of the main usage for a workstation. Display color accuracy is a nice to have but I have hard time believing that it is what is the most important to their users. Also, they will look fine when they will have color accuracy and HDR on their workstation and that all their applications are not able to use that or displaying with wrong theme and bad performance because of being flat pack apps...

GlacierFox 3y ago
The vast majority of the visual effects industry uses RHEL / Alma for compositing , color correction and many more aspects of the pipeline. I'd expect this userbase is more substantial than people using RHEL for libre office.
wheelerof4te 3y ago
How about this? RH will provide just the bare minimum of base OS and a bunch of devel-libraries to enable users who want to build their own software! It would be more in line with the intended audience, at least.

awill 3y ago

I don't really see the problem. I want the rock solid underpinnings of RHEL, and am ok with older kernels etc.., but I generally want updated apps like LibreOffice, Firefox etc.. To me it makes sense for those things to be Flatpak, and for you to just get them directly from the source. A Flatpak of LO maintained by LO, a flatpak of Firefox maintained by Firefox etc.. What's the problem with that?

wheelerof4te 3y ago
There is no problem with that. But it is just a simplified way of saying "Look! You can build your own software directly from the maintainers, but faster and much easier!" Basically, a glorified Gentoo way. We're back to square one.
- awill 3y ago
  It's not really building anything. You would just download a few apps from flathub.org
  - wheelerof4te 3y ago
    I know, I was just being hyperbolic.

quink 3y ago

Flatpaks continue to horrify me because of fundamental stuff like this that keeps getting completely ignored: https://github.com/flathub/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice/issues/176#issuecomment-1525686681 https://github.com/flathub/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice/issue... I swear, Desktop Linux has continued to regress in a downwards spiral since Mac OS X was first released, so only for about the past two decades. I also love the “solutions” that are recommended for when this happens with basically every Flatpak out there. They’re all either 1. install this application to change your settings after your stuff is gone or invisible and remember to do it forever or 2. instead of that application simply type these 80 characters into Terminal. Linux Desktop is a parody of itself.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

Dumb questions: To clarify, is libreOffice a red hat project? Does this mean the project needs a new maintainer? Or is this saying that the red hat distro is no longer ensuring compatibility (in favor of a different product?)? If they're just dropping support from the distro, what are they replacing it with?

davidgerard 3y ago
LO has a multi-vendor foundation, The Document Foundation. Red Hat has been a large contributor up to now, about as large a contributor as Collabora by commits. There are several other vendors and a lot of unaffiliated volunteer contributions.

clever-leap 3y ago

LibreOffice is such a bloatware that I migrated to SoftMaker office two years ago and never looked back.

davidgerard 3y ago

Caolan McNamara was one of the largest LO contributors at Red Hat, he's now moved to Collabora to keep doing the same stuff. https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2023-05-15-caolan.html https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2023-05-15-caolan.html

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I find it likely that the majority of people who pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are not using Libre Office? (and thus IBM/Redhat no longer wants to maintain it.) Does anyone know the ratio of "server" RHEL to "desktop" RHEL subscribers?

TZubiri 3y ago

Will it be replaced by some other office suite? As a non rhel user I don't get it

ninefathom 3y ago

And I'm sure there's zero chance that IBM will be releasing their own Linux office product- probably derived from LibreOffice, but with an additional support line item attached- in the very near future. Nope, no chance. //rolling my eyes into the back of my head//