LibreOffice Gets An OpenGL Rendering Back-End

[GreatEmerald]

Normal computer users aren't buying laptops or desktops anymore. A tablet *IS THE NEW DESKTOP*.

I know a few normal computer users. They are buying laptops (since their desktops are bought already and just need upgrades every now and then). They're not buying tablets (aside from e-book readers). And if they were, they would probably buy x86 tablets for the reasons that they couldn't use their regular software otherwise.

[Calinou]

And your tablet and smartphone *BOTH* support mouse and keyboard. Take your pick - bluetooth or USB.
Normal computer users aren't buying laptops or desktops anymore. A tablet *IS THE NEW DESKTOP*.

The PC is not dead.

[skriticos]

There is no learning curve.
LO *does* do all the things that msoffice does... and better.

What keeps the usage low **on ms os** is that people using that platform don't know any better.
What keeps the usage low **in general** is that they don't support Android.

Um, no.

LibreOffice is a fantastic project, but it does not do everything that MSO does and has stability issues. I'm not fan of word processors in general, but I was trying to create a serious document in recent weeks and LO has some way to go before catching up.

Practical example: I have created a custom style for headings and text elements. The user interface just plainly ignored some of my clicks, some of the windows were inconsistent and the thing crashed on me all the time.

The real elephant in the room are spreadsheets though, and here we venture into processing intensive tasks. Some spreadsheet tables I have been working with are just big and contain a freakish amount of calculations and require a lot of memory. Any kind of hardware acceleration in this respect is a <deity>send and definitely a worthwhile undertaking.

And don't get me started about UX. Even though MSO is still pushing that VBA BS, they did a good job with usability. You can find and configure controls and with a bit of practice get into a very fluid workflow. LO has some catching up to do in this respect.

As for Android support, later.. I'm glad they do what they do now: clean up an old codebase and incrementally upgrade the features and remove bugs. Once they got the desktop part in shape.. by all means.

You are of course free to conribute, pay someone to contribute or organize a fangroop to contribute. Dictating OSS developers what to do is not a very sensible thing to do.

[djalf]

Of course the desktop is not dead. I would like to see some professional video, photo or audio editing/creation on tablet. Tablets are mostly little toys for consuming the media. Keyboard and mouse are the master input devices for last 25+ years. Touch screens are no where near that.
On the topic, you have great KingSoft WPS office for free on Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice_eng

[efikkan]

Using OpenGL for rendering of some fancy graphs is pretty much uninteresting. However, doing a complete rendering of the GUI on the GPU and having an optimized design (like a good game engine) would be very interesting. But it will not happen...

[FLHerne]

There is no learning curve.
LO *does* do all the things that msoffice does... and better.

What keeps the usage low **on ms os** is that people using that platform don't know any better.
What keeps the usage low **in general** is that they don't support Android.

No, really very much no. LO's charts in particular are horribly broken, and essentially useless for anything beyond bar/pie charts to count things. Any sort of trendline configuration beyond 'here are four types' would be a good start. Or box-plots without abusing the 'Stocks' function.

The layout and formatting tools, while powerful, are far from intuitive and start throwing stuff around on a whim if you want inline diagrams or charts. File compatibility even with other LO versions is far from reliable where layout and formatting are concerned, let alone other ODT editors (or MS Office, but that's easily excusable). The caption numbering goes wrong if you move things around and can't be corrected without deleting half the captions, even if they're still attached to their image and haven't disappeared off to some far corner of the next page. And so on.

I really doubt that any significant number of people use heavy document processors on Android, let alone enough to meaningfully impact usage across multiple platforms. I know dozens of people who have tablets most of whom use text editors or spreadsheets for work - I think all of two of have Bluetooth keyboards and try to write stuff up on them, the others stick with proper laptops for that sort of work.

[GreatEmerald]

Using OpenGL for rendering of some fancy graphs is pretty much uninteresting. However, doing a complete rendering of the GUI on the GPU and having an optimized design (like a good game engine) would be very interesting. But it will not happen...

I'd rather they used an actual toolkit, like GTK or Qt, for their widgets, so that dark themes wouldn't horribly break the usability.

[quikee]

Using OpenGL for rendering of some fancy graphs is pretty much uninteresting. However, doing a complete rendering of the GUI on the GPU and having an optimized design (like a good game engine) would be very interesting. But it will not happen...

I wouldn't compare this with a game engine.. it is just not so simple to accelerate 2D graphics. Even Firefox and Chrome (concerning rendering an internet browser is almost the same as an ) only accelerate some things and not other. A game engine can also cut corners in rendering by using faster approximation and other tricks which are hard to notice in action - you just can't afford things like this in program like LibreOffice.

[curaga]

There is this;

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andropenoffice

...
The biggest problem with that particular openoffice-for-android, however, is that the prick who provides it is hoarding source for it.

Ah, the joys of the Apache license (or even the LO MPL, which would likely allow that!)

[FishB8]

Wow, so much stoopid.

Libreoffice does NOT need OpenGL to gain user share. OpenGL will do *absolutely nothing* in that regard, since word processing and spreadsheets work quite perfectly without ANY acceleration, and have since the beginning of time.

That's nice. Except that layers of raster, vector graphics, and text all composited together with complex 3D transforms used in transitions without OpenGL acceleration sucks donkey cock. You forgot about the "Impress" presentation application dip-shit.