Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement

[avis]

And of course, Linux fans, as always, will not see/turn a blind eye to a much bigger issue: there's no Linux, there's no platform to speak of. There's no way for ISVs to offer their software for all Linux distros except for Snap/Flatpak which I personally hate with passion. Snaps/flatpaks work horribly, integrate horribly, they result in a lot of space and RAM wasted. They are just a futile attempt to solve the issue of (in)compatibility not only between different distros but between different versions of the same distro.

But of course RedHat is "bad". Yeah, the company which has the largest number of contributions to open source and dedicated developers for the kernel, GCC, GTK, Gnome, Wayland, X.org and a hundred more open source projects. And of course, the company that has given the community systemd and PulseAudio/PipeWire which have basically become a standard.

[frytaped]

Seems like the person has now moved on to Collabora.

https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2023-05-15-caolan.html

[torsionbar28]

Meh, I haven't use LO in years, since I discovered SoftMaker Office.

[Nth_man]

Compared to Snaps where backend is proprietary and hardcoded in source code, Flatpak is fully open source and decentralized (you can use whatever repo you want or create your own).

The Register wrote that:
Yes, there is only one official Snap store, Canonical's own [Snapcraft](https://snapcraft.io/). But don't believe the FUD: it's perfectly possible to run your own if you wish. There's nothing proprietary in there, the APIs are documented (https://api.snapcraft.io/docs , https://snapcraft.io/docs), and the tools to publish a Snap store online are in Ubuntu's repositories. As we covered a year ago, [the maintainer of Ubuntu Unity](https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/...untu_projects/) published his own, called [lol](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lol-an-...entation/27109), as a proof of concept.
-- https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/23/ubuntu_remixes_drop_flatpak

[CommunityMember]

Nothing will prevent the Fedora community members from building LibreOffice, and some are likely to do so at least in the short term. I can understand RH's choice if (as I suspect) few of their paying customers depend on a desktop rpm LibraOffice and cannot use a flatpak.

[NotMine999]

I hope Linux will always have this option for it's users:

make ; make install ; install ; flip-Snap-and-Flat-the-bird

[ireri]

Compared to Snaps where backend is proprietary…

Snap is open, only the store is not, but it is possible to create third part stores.

[twelvedogs]

i haven't really been in a job or had to use office apps at home for the last 20 years except for doing resumes, the only time i think about them is when i do an update and have to download a gig of office apps i need to remember to uninstall the right way some time

os devs should be able to focus on os work, if there's an easy way to hand back control of the packaging to the app devs it should be done, though i'm sure someone will provide it as rpms anyway if you don't like flatpak

[avis]

I hope Linux will always have this option for it's users:

make ; make install ; install ; flip-Snap-and-Flat-the-bird

It's always been there the problem is it's unusable for 99.99% of people in the world.

And even those who can use it, may face a ton of issues:

• How to install all the dependencies? ./configure and cmake .. often spew out completely cryptic errors in terms of what's missing on your system.
• What if the source application has the dependencies that your distro doesn't provide?
• OK, you've run make install (which normally goes to /usr/local) - what about the future when you need to install newer versions? All the old files will remain and that can easily result in a misbehaving application. Not a single Linux application I've ever dealt with has provided make uninstall.

Packaging was invented for a reason.

[ehansin]

i haven't really been in a job or had to use office apps at home for the last 20 years except for doing resumes, the only time i think about them is when i do an update and have to download a gig of office apps i need to remember to uninstall the right way some time

os devs should be able to focus on os work, if there's an easy way to hand back control of the packaging to the app devs it should be done, though i'm sure someone will provide it as rpms anyway if you don't like flatpak

This would kind of be my take as well I think. I don't use LibreOffice (or anything like it) on my Linux installs. I switched over to "stock" Fedora Workstation recently for various reasons, but part of what I end up with is the full LibreOffice installation that I really do not need. There are plenty of other things I do not need as well, but LO is a pretty sizable package. Anyway, for me, I have no issue seeing this available only as a Flatpack or whatever.