LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released

[Marc Driftmeyer]

First, you don't learn TeX. You learn XeLaTeX/LaTeX and mainly you learn to write with the macro packages. Writing novels and using Memoir has been worth every moment spent. Moving to Epub for electronic was a snap with 20+ years of XHTML/HTML 5 coding.

Writing Company documentations with LibreOffice 5.2 guarantees I'll never touch MSOffice. With interoperability growing with iWorks I can either just install LibreOffice 5.2 on OS X or leverage each suite for their strengths.

I have zero desire to use Google Docs. I can deploy on iCloud or share my docs within DropBox, to setting up a NAS.

The cash cow for MS is waning. MSOffice has been subsidizing their bottom line for decades. Google Docs is a bag of hurt. LibreOffice extends cloud support to DropBox and it's Paper feature set and you'll see a large business opportunity for both camps to extend resources to meet both objectives.

Large corporations will more readily invest in dev resources to extend LibreOffice than put their trust in a cloud based Google Docs service. Documentation is where a company houses its valuation. Trusting it to Google is insane.

[Jumbotron]

I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but I think LibreOffice right now apart from the Linux Kernel itself is THE most important FOSS project on the planet. Let me explain. One of the above posters mentioned that Microsoft's Office products have been subsidising MS for years. True. In fact, it was the bundling of Word, Excel, Access and Outlook around the time of Win 95 / NT that caused the eventual doom of Wordperfect, Borland Quattro and dBase, and Lotus 123 while ensconcing in the minds of Big Business and Big Government and Big Education that Microsoft was a one stop shop for IT and software.

However.....with budgets across the WORLD tightening if not collapsing in Big Business and Big Government and Big Education, high level folks in all those areas are looking for cheaper and more reliable solutions. You see the move particularly in Europe as many municipalities if not whole countries moving to LibreOffice in particular and FOSS and Linux generally. And with the disaster that is Microsoft Office 365 and attested to here in an article by The Register.com's Trevor Pott
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/29/office_woes/ and that I can personally attest to with a couple of years experience at a company I used to work for, LibreOffice has a real chance, particularly when they roll out the cloud version of LibreOffice, to finally chip away at Microsoft's real cash cow in a significant way and thus slowly but surely break Microsoft's hold on computing in the world forever.

[Mez']

Audience? Well, I am happy to have it. I do most simple stuff in text editors, but next step is LibO and the likes. And I wrote my PhD theses in LibO (no time to get into Tex and the primary referee would have killed me for using LaTex); so it can't be that bad.
Online solutions / SaaS are for people who have no sense for privacy, people who don't care about anything.

Same here.
I actually dropped MS Office for OO 2.3 then LO in 2008 (and got rid of my dual boot at that exact same time to be full Linux ever since) because it was simply much more powerful to write my thesis with. You actually spend more time to write the content than to format it, which is such a relief when you come from MS Word. I also presented my work the same year with Impress (on Ubuntu 8.04). Smoothly.
To this day, it's still a hassle to write elaborate documents with Word (especially with different headers/footnotes and numbering for each section, indented bullet points or an automatic table of contents), and Office in general is so non intuitive you always have people getting angry at it in open spaces. For a reason.

[Mez']

In fact, it was the bundling of Word, Excel, Access and Outlook around the time of Win 95 / NT that caused the eventual doom of Wordperfect, Borland Quattro and dBase, and Lotus 123 while ensconcing in the minds of Big Business and Big Government and Big Education that Microsoft was a one stop shop for IT and software.

Very recently, I worked on a mission for a year at a big life insurance company where Lotus Notes was the email platform in use and nobody was disoriented or struggling. And for booking meeting rooms, it was such a breeze. On Windows, but it can be deployed as much on Linux.
Hence, "ensconcing in the minds" is indeed the relevant choice of words.

[caligula]

However.....with budgets across the WORLD tightening if not collapsing in Big Business and Big Government and Big Education, high level folks in all those areas are looking for cheaper and more reliable solutions. You see the move particularly in Europe as many municipalities if not whole countries moving to LibreOffice in particular and FOSS and Linux generally. And with the disaster that is Microsoft Office 365 and attested to here in an article by The Register.com's Trevor Pott

My impression is that all schools are using either O365 or GAFE. It's just how it is. Almost no companies are selling Linux solutions. The apps look outdated and don't work in the cloud. I've tried owncloud, sharelatex etc. They're horribly unusable and unstable compared to commercial solutions. People can't afford big machines anymore. Students use Chromebooks and want Google online apps. Maintaining Linux is awful as always. All distros invent their own stuff. For instance Ubuntu is coming with yet another network solution after a million previous choices. It's pathetic.

[starshipeleven]

I've tried owncloud, sharelatex etc. They're horribly unusable and unstable compared to commercial solutions.

OWnCloud horribly unusable and unstable? Tell me more.

People can't afford big machines anymore.

All laptops can usually run a full office suite without issues.

Students use Chromebooks and want Google online apps.

More like "need office compatibility but cannot afford MSO nor want/can crack it".

Maintaining Linux is awful as always.

Quit using Gentoo and Arch.

All distros invent their own stuff.

You're talking of Ubuntu, most other stuff is shared.

For instance Ubuntu is coming with yet another network solution after a million previous choices. It's pathetic.

lolwtf? Ubuntu is coming with a unified manager program to control the network programs that run the network on their different devices.

[fuzz]

Quit using Gentoo and Arch.

Gentoo is probably one of the easiest to maintain because you have full control over everything by default.

[starshipeleven]

oh, unapproved... (eats a kitten), damn vBullettin! (eats another cute little kitten, ALIVE).

Gentoo is probably one of the easiest to maintain because you have full control over everything by default.

Complete bs.
Debian Stable, CentOS or RHEL, or SUSE are the easiest to mantain, you only need to run updates every once in a while, and the chances updates will break something are pretty close to 0.

Don't get me wrong, but "more control" = "more possible choices" = "more time to decide" + "more time to make mistakes" + "more time to fix shit up".
Also Gentoo is much more bleeding edge than most mainstream distros being that allows you to pull the newest sources and recompile them, and this means you get much more random breakage than say Debian where on Stable you are locked on 2 year old crap and only fixes are backported.

Sure you can run Gentoo playing it safe and staying with default options with no tinkering, not even a little weird Cflag on some programs. But if you run Gentoo with default options you're using it wrong. Gentoo isn't for those that run with distro-approved default options.

[Jumbotron]

My impression is that all schools are using either O365 or GAFE. It's just how it is. Almost no companies are selling Linux solutions. The apps look outdated and don't work in the cloud. I've tried owncloud, sharelatex etc. They're horribly unusable and unstable compared to commercial solutions. People can't afford big machines anymore. Students use Chromebooks and want Google online apps. Maintaining Linux is awful as always. All distros invent their own stuff. For instance Ubuntu is coming with yet another network solution after a million previous choices. It's pathetic.

You do know that you are talking about the present. Which as I type is moving nanosecond by nanosecond into the future. And the future is going to be largely Microsoft free.

You should also know that LibreOffice is going to release a cloud based version ( Microsoft 365 like ) of LibreOffice late this year or early next. Which only will accelerate LibreOffice's acceptance by most non American governments and institutions, which...as most laws and business regulations are being synchronized by world governments and multinational corporations....means that America will follow suit as well. Maybe another 10 years or so.....but it is inevitable.

You should also know that Google is the most successful Linux company on the planet. No? I mean...you should know that Android runs on top of the Linux Kernel. You should know that Chrome OS is Gentoo Linux. You do know that Google is merging Android and Chrome together. Yes...yes I know that you can't fire up most "Linux" programs on your Ubuntu or Red Hat desktop and run them unmodified in Chrome or Android. But....none the less....Desktop Linux, ChromeOS Linux, Android Linux are all chipping away at Microsoft's Global Software Hegemony. And that is a very.....very....good thing.

And if you think the state of Desktop Linux including productivity software is such crap.....well....jump right in mister and fix things. The source code is yours to play with. Or at the very least...use it and submit bug reports and usability suggestions.

[starshipeleven]

You should also know that Google is the most successful Linux company on the planet. No? I mean...you should know that Android runs on top of the Linux Kernel. You should know that Chrome OS is Gentoo Linux.

C'mon, quit bunching together the weird-ass Java-first mobile OS and the glorified mobile web kiosk OS to Linux Desktop just because they share the kernel.

What is killing microsoft is basically Moore's law (or the lack thereof), none in his right mind upgrades an office license in the same way none upgrades an OS on a company PC unless forced at gunpoint.

Since PCs can now last indefinitely, they are fucked.