LibreOffice 4.0 Released With Immense Changes

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm not sure about LibreOffice but this is definatly not true for Firefox. Firefox has seperate GUI code for each platform and for Linux its written in GTK.

All Mozilla software uses GUI written in XUL. GTK acts simply as a backend for XUL on Linux. There was a Qt port for a while, but it was discontinued.

And LibreOffice, like StarOffice is based on VCL, their internal toolkit. There is a Qt version of that too.

[boast]

Is LO's grammar checker now better or equal to Word's?

[Awesomeness]

They added useless shit like Firefox personas skin support, instead of porting it o GTK3, improving the file format support, or shipping some post-1995 templates for Impress.

While I'm not a huge fan of either, OpenOffice 4.0 sounds way more exciting. At least Apache is developing a widescreen-friendly UI for OpenOffice.

[wargames]

I am not sure I agree with your statement "While LibreOffice isn't yet up to par with Microsoft Office...". My wife has written her PhD in LibreOffice. She is currently working in publishing. Prior to that she taught English at the University level for 15 years. She has extensive experience using both MS Word and LibreOffice Writer. I have used Calc, Impress, Excel, and PowerPoint extensively myself. Writer, Calc, and Impress are at least as good as the comparable parts of MS Office.

Writer as good as Word ? Are you kidding ? It's buggy and painfully slow. For instance, try inserting some images and manipulate them. Sometimes it takes up to a minute to change the image settings.

[droste]

9 out of 10 people I know hate it.

Do they have reasons? Have they actually used it? I wrote 2 thesis, 1 with 2003 and one with 2007. I have to say that the ribbon style is much easier and flexible as soon as you are used to it.
There sure is a transition phase where you have the "what? where is this option? it used to be here" moments, but this is quickly over and you can be productive. Now that I know where the stuff is I don't want to switch back to the 2003 style.

[brosis]

Err... What? It's more advanced because it uses a UI paradigm from the Windows 95 days? No. The Ribbon interface was the best to happen to MSO in a good few releases.

9 out of 10 people I know hate it. 1 likes it, apparently you fall into this 10% category. But to be true, it should have been made available, but only and only as option. Right now it is forced over people just like Metro is forced by 8. People run away, 10% stays. Actually, I don't care, because I never used MSO - only at worked I was forced one time to use Windows, and first few times I found "Classic Menu" extension, that worked more or less, but several days later I installed portable LibreOffice there and forgot any issues.

The single thing I like about MSO is how they allow to intelligently draw "tables", this is much harder in LO.

[movieman]

I have to use the Ribbon stuff as MSOffice-2010 is actually standard at the company I work for and to be honest actually dislike it a lot.

The 'ribbon' is astonishingly good at displaying lots of icons I have no need or intention to use at the time while hiding the ones I do want. If only they could flip a switch somewhere to make it the other way around, and hide the ones I don't want, it would be a decent interface.

[timothyja]

Actually they are not using GTK except for theming their own toolkit (Firefox is implemented the same way).

I'm not sure about LibreOffice but this is definatly not true for Firefox. Firefox has seperate GUI code for each platform and for Linux its written in GTK.

You just need to look at the GTK2 to GTK3 port bug to see its much more than theming https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627699

[stikonas]

Neither Libre Office, nor MS Office are up to part with L_AT_EX anyway...

[Hamish Wilson]

I have only used ribbon when I was writing my diploma exams, and while I admit it is not that bad it certainly is not easily discoverable. By the end of writing my Social30 written exam we were forced to help the examiner figure it out, even though we had never used it before, and he had.