LibreOffice Removes Support For Some Old Targets: AIX, 32-bit s390 & More

[kylew77]

I wouldn't call AIX old, it is still an active Unix but is mostly used on POWER 9 and 10 servers, not desktop use so I guess an office suite isn't needed. You can still find some AIX admin jobs that pay good money. They are much fewer in number compared to cloud admins or Linux admin jobs but they still exist, especially in the financial sector.

[darkonix]

Who uses "their download page" among the readers of this site? Nobody.

And if you are so overstressed by using a "download page", maybe you should leave software installation to other people.

I do. For windows or macOS.

[oiaohm]

No, I know what I'm doing. The thing freezed and got confused and replaced my file with old save. It's not like you can anticipate when it would freez and burn..

All office suites can do this this is not a unique Libreoffice thing. Freeze and burn is normal. You have to choose your style of burn.

And also, with libreoffice, one crashes, everything else also crashes. If only one doc lost, i wouldn't whine like I do.

This is better than MS Office where one document with word in it crashes then all the following documents you save from other open versions of word at the time and other instance of word opened while any of the prior word instances are still open are all saved in a damaged way that will not open in MS Office and if you are lucky will open in either libreoffice/openoffice if not all gone. Screwed up back-end state is very horrible,.

Libreoffice and openoffice choose the burn of if something gone wrong we will stop everything this prevent the burn from spreading. Microsoft Office choose the selective failure route that means if the backend has gone bad you have the software equal to cable virus that could spread across your complete work day. You think the failure you had was bad its nothing to the MS Office version.

The worst I have seen was in business luck they were using CMIS that automatically kept prior saved version over 120 documents in a single day from a single copy of Ms Office word backend going bad had incorrectly written up to the CMIS. Remember the person who did this over 120 file damage only had max of 10 documents at a time. Yes only one document had appeared to crash on them. After seeing this Libreoffice/openoffice crashing out did not seam that bad to me.

There are reasons why in business it like back up regularly or run CMIS servers like sharepoint or nextcloud.

mirmirmir everything is a trade off here.

I guess you never checked the libreoffice "Tools - Options - Load/Save - General" "Save AutoRecovery information every". The libreoffice default is losing 10 mins of work is acceptable this can be adjusted down 1 min if that suites you better. MS Office default autosave that is the same feature is 5 to 10 min depending on version. Current versions of MS Office are also 10 min default with configuration adjustment down to 1 min. OnlyOffice desktop is also 10min with no adjustment.

mirmirmir sorry to say majority of what happened to you is status normal for using Office suite software. Loss of 10 mins work*number of documents open is classed as acceptable data loss. People don't press the save button anywhere near as often as they should. Data management policy stuff you really do need to learn to do. As this data management policy create would have had you look at the AutoRecovery time frames and the acceptable data loss level.

I want to love the thing. But these things. Also shilling to companies? Shoving to your face word "community"? "Business" banner? Huh, blender has richer sugar daddy and yeah.

Developers have to be paid somehow. Companies using program commercially want rapid support. Blender does not have a rich sugar day these days.

https://studio.blender.org/welcome/ Most of the money that funds blender development comes in from the studio cloud fees.

The reality is people without a pay check cannot be doing SLA level support work. SLA level support work due to possible access to confidential information to solve the problems to legally enforce privacy of that information person need to be paid. The business side of libreoffice about funding and meeting the requirements business using libreoffice require for support.

[ryao]

I wouldn't call AIX old, it is still an active Unix but is mostly used on POWER 9 and 10 servers, not desktop use so I guess an office suite isn't needed. You can still find some AIX admin jobs that pay good money. They are much fewer in number compared to cloud admins or Linux admin jobs but they still exist, especially in the financial sector.

The commit message indicates that the code enabling AIX support is being removed because it is broken:

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=70bcf9e8bea1fee9cca44437730324ba7805b633

Presumably, they would be open to patches to bring it into working order.

[cl333r]

You surely have a backup. No one forced you to do a major upgrade of the software in the middle of a project.
And again, no Linux user should visit a "download page".

Linux users are not a special breed of people, quite the opposite, historically it's Linux users who are expected to do heavy lifting, compile their shit and whatnot.

[schmidtbag]

No, I know what I'm doing. The thing freezed and got confused and replaced my file with old save. It's not like you can anticipate when it would freez and burn.

It doesn't do that; you have to tell it what it loads.

I want to love the thing. But these things. Also shilling to companies? Shoving to your face word "community"? "Business" banner? Huh, blender has richer sugar daddy and yeah.

Not sure what you're getting at here.

[kpedersen]

Linux users are not a special breed of people, quite the opposite, historically it's Linux users who are expected to do heavy lifting, compile their shit and whatnot.

Indeed. The decent ones have moved over to BSD.

Actually, we have an official OOo port. Well ahead of most Linux distros there.

[oiaohm]

Indeed. The decent ones have moved over to BSD.

Actually, we have an official OOo port. Well ahead of most Linux distros there.

I am not sure I would be talking up openoffice that much. There is a reason why openoffice is so far behind on Linux distributions It simple to forget the go-oo build of OpenOffice make by novell that lots of distributions used before Libreoffice existed that was a patch set to improve language and Linux platform support. go-oo is part of what Libreoffice is built from. Openoffice only support 41 languages vs Libreoffice 112 languages.

Decent ones moved to BSD you need to be way more careful with that statement. Take freebsd the manuals are in 6 languages then take debian the manuals are in 30 languages. Yes openbsd and netbsd are worse on language support than freebsd.

Then you look at debian 30 languages. You notice Ukrainian just to pick kind of a hot topic. Yes Apache OpenOffice has 41 languages it does not include Ukrainian. Go-oo yes this exists before libreoffice exists happened to support Ukrainian. Yes I could have picked a different language. Debian 30 supported languages in manuals don't align to Apache OpenOffice 41 supported languages. Debian 30 supported languages are a subset of go-oo of past and current day libreoffice supported languages.

There are a lot of decent people who are not going to moved to BSD because BSD does not support their native language. Linux distributions not shipping with OpenOffice mainline predates Libreoffice existing for the same problem. Apache OpenOffice has not addressed the lack of language support.

Yes this language problem is something onlyoffice runs into as well with is the 23 languages onlyoffice supports. Linux distributions defaulting to libreoffice make absolute sense once you look at the language problem.

kpederson freebsd documentation recommends libreoffice over apache openoffice because Apache OpenOffice is more resource heavy. So between poor language support and being resource heavy most Linux distributions go bugger supporting Apache openoffice its far better to put all resources into libreoffice instead.

Language support is something that is simple to overlook but the historic reason why over 5 years before Libreoffice existed majority of linux distributions were using go-oo as their OpenOffice including debian.

Mainline OpenOffice if you look closely at history had lost the majority Linux market share 5 years before Libreoffice existed in a large part due to poor language support.

Major Linux distributions are well ahead of BSDs when it comes to language support.

[Estranged1906]

So does that mean LibreOffice will continue to work on Illumos but not anymore on Solaris?

[tildearrow]

Who uses "their download page" among the readers of this site? Nobody.

And if you are so overstressed by using a "download page", maybe you should leave software installation to other people.

How many "readers of this site" are LibreOffice's user base? 5%.

Having an easier download page has the potential to increase appeal.