LibreOffice 4.0 Alpha 1 Is Freed For Testing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice 4.0 Alpha 1 Is Freed For Testing

For those interested in testing out a new open-source office suite this holiday weekend, LibreOffice 4.0 Alpha 1 was quietly tagged this week...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIzNTU

[uid313]

Templates

The templates in LibreOffice still looks like they're from 1995.

[mark45]

Sun Microsystems got bankrupted for a good reason. While it did good hardware, it sucked a lot at creating desktop software, it simply wrote incredibly bloated and silly code - that's what I came to realize the last few years while reading random posts, and especially those related to improving LibreOffice, like this one recently. No wonder MS Office won over OpenOffice a decade ago since the competition was so lazy and out of touch with reality.

[garegin]

Sun Microsystems got bankrupted for a good reason. While it did good hardware, it sucked a lot at creating desktop software, it simply wrote incredibly bloated and silly code - that's what I came to realize the last few years while reading random posts, and especially those related to improving LibreOffice, like this one recently. No wonder MS Office won over OpenOffice a decade ago since the competition was so lazy and out of touch with reality.

it's only worse now. there is no suggar daddy like sun. libreoffice is like other anemic FOSS projects such as KDE, gimp and samba. they simply don't have the manpower and are getting a burnout

[schmidtbag]

it's only worse now. there is no suggar daddy like sun. libreoffice is like other anemic FOSS projects such as KDE, gimp and samba. they simply don't have the manpower and are getting a burnout

I'm not sure what either of you are talking about. Libreoffice has progressed a considerable amount since the departure from OpenOffice. While it may still be lacking in some areas, i don't encounter many functionality issues with it. I also wouldn't consider it terribly bloated when you compare it to MS Office and considering it seems to have more features (and complete ones at that) compared to other office suites.

As for KDE, yes there does seem to be too much to maintain but I'm getting the impression they're ironing out bugs and cleaning up code before they start adding new things. KDE hasn't had many serious additions since 4.5, which to me is fine since it does what I want and every update fixes problems i encounter.

I also don't know where you're getting that samba is getting burnt out. I got the impression that SMB file sharing was pretty much complete. Aside from homegroups and a user friendly way of setting it up, what is samba missing?

I would have to agree that gimp is struggling badly. I'm actually pretty surprised no one has come to help them out, or more surprisingly, that there's no other open source competitor (that I'm aware of) that's actually better.

[jumico]

No wonder MS Office won over OpenOffice a decade ago since the competition was so lazy and out of touch with reality.

Is that also why internet explorer beat out netscape?

[curaga]

Is that also why internet explorer beat out netscape?

The Netscape code was absolutely horrible, according to the Mozilla people. So in that case, it was both reasons

MS being a monopolist, _and_ competition doing bad code.

[blackiwid]

The Netscape code was absolutely horrible, according to the Mozilla people. So in that case, it was both reasons

MS being a monopolist, _and_ competition doing bad code.

Rofl I dont get it why MS-Fanboy-Trolls are coming to phoronix and troll about foss-software here? I would not go to a Microsoft-admin-website and bitch around about how sad Microsofts Products are, and why they are just loosing all servers and all Users to linux faster and faster... (that would be a bit biased, there is a true core in my statement but its a bit overdue, its like you do here flaming or trolling).

Netscapes Problem was that IE did not cost 1 cent, if it owuld have cost 1 dollar, it would never won this battle in this time, but now god bless IE has lost, thanks to google, but even the Netscape-version firefox was good enough to beat him... just chromium is even better than that (faster).

To Libreoffice, I also think it sucks, but I also think that MS Office sucks... so its more of a do you like such big slow office packages or not... I dont like non of them... but libreoffice gets now after its really a free thing where developers will not get in 90% of the time, we dont intergrate that, and a stupid feature-release-shit that also slows all down, faster better. its progresses at least in 3x speed of the before development speed, and thats great... I think even the format wars get cooled down soon when in progresses in this rate 2-3 years docx files that get not perfectly open will be a seldom thing.

[d2kx]

LibreOffice works perfectly fine for me and many others and .docx etc. are supported very well now. A lot of people at my university use it without second thought.

[Awesomeness]

Some nice new features are in there but I don't really get why they call that 4.0.
I'm under the impression the new version number is a reaction to Apache who are working on an actual OpenOffice 4.0 with that Lotus Symphony stuff integrated and more.