LibreOffice Gets An OpenGL Rendering Back-End

[brk0_0]

Blender isn't a fair comparison, because it had a really mind-boggling counter-intuitive interface (dragging the top to reveal options, for example). LibreOffice doesn't have such problems, and generally has the same things in the same places as in MS Office 2003. If there is a learning curve coming from MS Office 2003, I am yet to see one (one of the people I maintain an office computer for didn't even notice anything when, during the update from XP to Win8, MS Office 2003 was replaced with LibreOffice).

As for new users, they might prefer something that is better and easier to use, but what is better and easier to use for everyone? If you do sweeping changes like GNOME is doing, there would be a lot of annoyed people. Like I said, better leave those things to Calligra, see what they come up, and if it works for everyone, perhaps slowly migrate towards that. The fact that Calligra is new and not everything is finished yet isn't much of a problem, all projects have to start somewhere. They've been making good progress so far.

If you use the same interface since 2003 (or even before it) it doesn't make this interface intuitive per-se. You are only used to it. And I don't know about the Office you said. But where I worked, people had problems plotting graphics, inserting images on text files, diagramming text, IIRC getting used to Calc functions, making presentations.

If you design something correctly, you can make an interface that is better to most people. And now, after more tha 10 years, most have MSOffice 2007 (or later) experience, and find MSOffice 2003's one very confusing...GNOME (wich I think is not bad) is a valid comparison, but iOS is too. iOS was a revolutionary step foward, with risk beign taken and it worked. Most people are happier with iOS and find it much easier to use than the old phone interfaces. Also, it's much more powerful. We, on open-source side, are much more conservative regarding GUI tools that I tought we would be.

Here is the thing: Calligra may develop bad design decisions, and after finding that, what choices do we have? Two 90s-looking, unreliable, missing-features, narrow-minded, almost-equal Office Suites. If, after the changes I "suggested", you don't like LibreOffice or Calligra, you could go back to OpenOffice and it's conservative approach. No problem.

Sorry about my English, I am not a native speaker.

[techzilla]

Source Hoarders and

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

Couldn't agree more!

Once again a permissive licence grants the community it's benefits. This is why I'm so glad about LibreOffice, and The Document Foundation. Apparently LibreOffice4Android has builds, but still has usability problems, although I believe it will be the project that bring home the bacon. Unless a more permissive OpenOffice based project gets a benevolent corporate sponsor, but in practice, that just doesn't happen most the time.

I also want to mention, while I fully support the android port, I also fully support the OpenGL/OpenCL work. We need solid OpenGL/OpenCL support to provide the best possible experience. It can really be night and day, especially with ugly monstrous office spreadsheets!

[mrugiero]

We, on open-source side, are much more conservative regarding GUI tools that I tought we would be.

Well, actually, most people both in open source and in closed source, as users, tend to be conservative in the UI. The difference is that closed source can force their decisions on users, and in open source, while possible (the average user might just adapt to whatever their distro of choice puts there, as happens with Ubuntu), is harder to accomplish. Also, in open source the separation between users and developers is fuzzy. Developers here are usually also users, and have this biased on being used to something making them believe it's actual the best you can get, in terms of UI, pretty much the same people experience when trying to migrate from Windows: they feel their new OS is "harder", because they are used to Windows.

[CFWhitman]

It seems to me that there are two main obstacles that prevent people from using LibreOffice instead of MSOffice: either the learning curve is too steep and people don't bother, or LO simply can't do things that MSO does. If these two main hurdles are overcome, the user base should certainly increase substantially.

I would think that the biggest obstacle is actually the fact that so many people use Microsoft Office and documents need to be exchanged with that majority of users. Microsoft actively works to make compatibility poorer. They even manage to release specifications for their formats for advertising purposes and still make the documents the most recent version of Office actually creates incompatible with those specifications.

[Saverios]

I don't think the UI of LibreOffice is the problem for widespread adoption. Even if it looks "outdated", people using such a program don't even notice it after a while, as long as it is usable. Personally I prefer LO's UI to Word's ribbon mainly because of usability and clutter: I will probably NOT use EVERY damn feature the program offers so why should it be right there in the middle of everything, adding visual noise? It makes much more sense to keep the most commonly used functions readily accessible and be able to place them wherever is most convenient and keep everything that is seldomly used neatly tucked away in menus and stuff.

Let's face it: "new" is not always "modern" or "better". While I agree that LO's aesthetics could use a retouch (the Mozilla personas was a great step in that direction), I consider this sort of UI to be much more user friendly and usable than the Ribbon and you will have a hard time convincing me that a new user will have an easier time memorizing the location of a gazillion icons hidden behind 17 or so tabs than the 5-10 formatting and insert buttons used by 90% of word processor users out there, which, by the way, are also customizable according to the user's preferences.

Again, I do not expect my word processor to be very exciting. I prefer "usable" and "reliable" over "exciting" every time when it comes to my everyday tools.

[liam]

Haha, that's a good one. Windows has had fully accelerated text rendering since 2009: DirectWrite. It shipped with Win7 and uses the GPU exclusively.

LibreOffice should *really* focus on its user interface, it's so ugly that I prefer to use Google Docs instead.

Wow, you're quite the polite fellow...
Unfortunately I'm unable to link to the talk in Perth but behdad said (around the 2:20 mark) that no one has solved this problem. I looked at direct write, which uses direct 2d and I looked at d2d awhile back when I was looking at accelerated 2d APIs. Even direct 2d doesn't provide fully accelerated drawing. Rendering, yes, but certain types of rasterization must still be done on the CPU. What behdad is working on is GPU accelerated rasterization where said step is faster than the CPU can ddo
If you're interested the project is called glyphy.