Manjaro Moving Ahead With Snap Support, Bundling Proprietary FreeOffice

[Grogan]

A great reason to not use this shitty distro. The idea of bundling an office suite by default by itself is silly, not to mention how ridiculous it is to pick a proprietary one.

Where is git in these distros? It's tiny, and it provides tangible value of being able to pull in dotfiles for software you want to use. I rarely need an office suite in the first place, and there are organizations that rely on web solutions.

Manjaro provides git, I use it most every day. You're really barking up the wrong tree here, as it's got Arch's dev environment. If you were complaining about all the bullshit you have to go through to get a good dev environment (and I don't mean just "apt-get install build-essential") on *buntu distros you'd have something.

Agree with you on the proprietary office suite (and I'm unimpressed by containerized rubbish in general... not what I want to see encouraged), but proper LibreOffice distro packages are there too.

[starshipeleven]

They're still short on projects that nobody besides them cares about, and then killing them off.

Oh, I know. They could contribute to Wayland!

I care about Wayland, so your statement is invalid

[Hi-Angel]

I just downloaded and installed the software just to confirm whether or not what you say is true. The software allows you to open .doc files but only to save in the newer docx format or their own format if you don't want to pay.

Thanks for doing the comparison!

My problem with this FreeOffice bundle is that it has tons of missing features compared to LibreOffice and the paid Softmaker Office.

It's apparently crippled and if I'm reading right, it wont let you save in older Office formats and doesn't even have spell check.

I keep seeing people comment with stuff like this without substance. Maybe people can provide examples (like the comparison page above) instead of vague generalizations.

The LO site has a comparison table, see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/...te:_LibreOffic e_vs._SoftMaker_Office

Btw, apparently not many peoples tried Softmaker Office, so many rectangles on their side has question marks. So, just in case someone is interested in filling them: that would be great.

I'll give you some facts. The windows binary for FreeDesktop is 114MB and LibreOffice is 282MB. The DEB binaries are 123MB and 168MB respectively. Is that a sign of a more efficient piece of software? Is it a sign of a lack of features? Until someone can point out some lack of features then I'll assume it's just more efficient.

Well, acc. to the comparison table LibeOffice has simply more utilties bundled with it, so yeah, more functional requires more weight.

But disregarding, this is an odd way of comparison. Unless you're running an embedded system, a difference of dozens or even hundreds of MBs for a massive Office suite shouldn't matter.

[Danielsan]

People that give up at the first issue have already decided what is best (and it is not the thing they are trying right now). You are wasting your time with them.

The big advantage I got with Linux is that I stopped to be a 24H help desk. I don't even convince people to install any Linux distro anymore. I don't waste my time with anyone since a very long time...

[elatllat]

You misspelled Gentoo, fixed that for you

A package manager that deals with source only is inefficient and not "easy to use" when compile errors occur.

Cough*OpenSUSE Tumbleweed*Cough

Thanks, I'll try that next time.

[starshipeleven]

A package manager that deals with source only is inefficient and not "easy to use" when compile errors occur.

It was a joke. Gentoo is probably the hardest distro possible for a newcomer and as such "install Gentoo" is a common joke to people suggesting other hard distros like Arch when someone asks about a easy distro, and also a meme for the same reason https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/install-gentoo

Thanks, I'll try that next time.

Main reason I use it it's because it has a GUI interface for more or less anything you want to do when configuring the system, Yast, https://www.opensuse-guide.org/yast.php

[Templar82]

I don't really see the point in Snaps on a rolling distro with large repos, but more power to the user I guess.

[muncrief]

I like Manjaro, and over time have found it has the best balance of up to date software without being too buggy, and ease of use.

And no, I'm not a newbie, I've been using Linux since the early 2000s. I know many people don't like Manjaro because it's not "pure" Arch, but to each his own. I've tried Arch numerous times and just don't see the point in having to set up every tiny bit of Linux, only to have it often break because of blind update releases. I'm just too old to go through all that nonsense anymore. I don't need my OS to be a challenge, or brag to people that I'm "smart enough" to make it work, I just want it to work out of the box as well as possible.

But this FreeOffice thing is just wrong. The purpose of FreeOffice is to lure people into buying proprietary software, and that's where I draw a line. I was already disturbed by the MS Office Online shortcut, but decided to live with it because it was only a shortcut. But like I said, this is different and I'm going to seriously look at other distros again. The problem is I just went through a cycle of that, and even tried Ubuntu again, so I really don't know if there's any reasonable alternative.

[stormcrow]

I like Manjaro, and over time have found it has the best balance of up to date software without being too buggy, and ease of use.

...
But this FreeOffice thing is just wrong. The purpose of FreeOffice is to lure people into buying proprietary software, and that's where I draw a line. I was already disturbed by the MS Office Online shortcut, but decided to live with it because it was only a shortcut. But like I said, this is different and I'm going to seriously look at other distros again. The problem is I just went through a cycle of that, and even tried Ubuntu again, so I really don't know if there's any reasonable alternative.

Might give OpenSUSE Leap a try. It's relatively conservative (far more so than its counterpart Fedora) but tends to keep reasonably up-to-date userland. My major quibble with it around 13.1 or so is that sound configuration on an older desktop was such a hassle that I gave up on it (multiple external USB devices + primary internal audio) because YAST was constantly getting in the way of audio "just working" - as opposed to Ubuntu 16.04 working out-of-the-box.

One caveat: brand new CPUs may not have stellar support. Leap uses the same kernel as the enterprise version which is based on 4.12 + backports from 4.19 for drivers. Unfortunately for my own personal use this isn't good enough. My laptop's 8300H Intel CPU causes certain module oopses and the nouveau driver must be blacklisted (Nvidia 1060 Max Q Optimus) entirely or the laptop will completely hang on kernel initialization. I've been using Kubuntu 18.04.2 on it instead which has kernel 4.18.x and seems stable (again blacklisting nouveau on boot till the Nvidia drivers are properly installed).

[muncrief]

Might give OpenSUSE Leap a try. It's relatively conservative (far more so than its counterpart Fedora) but tends to keep reasonably up-to-date userland. My major quibble with it around 13.1 or so is that sound configuration on an older desktop was such a hassle that I gave up on it (multiple external USB devices + primary internal audio) because YAST was constantly getting in the way of audio "just working" - as opposed to Ubuntu 16.04 working out-of-the-box.

One caveat: brand new CPUs may not have stellar support. Leap uses the same kernel as the enterprise version which is based on 4.12 + backports from 4.19 for drivers. Unfortunately for my own personal use this isn't good enough. My laptop's 8300H Intel CPU causes certain module oopses and the nouveau driver must be blacklisted (Nvidia 1060 Max Q Optimus) entirely or the laptop will completely hang on kernel initialization. I've been using Kubuntu 18.04.2 on it instead which has kernel 4.18.x and seems stable (again blacklisting nouveau on boot till the Nvidia drivers are properly installed).

Thank you for taking the time to reply, I appreciate your suggestion. I did look at OpenSUSE a short time ago and it's just too much back porting for me. I'd have problems with it under any circumstance, but since I have an R9 390 GPU it just wouldn't work. It's bad enough with the latest kernel and open source drivers, and the old kernel OpenSUSE uses can't be back ported to fully support it because the changes required are too significant.