Best Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux

[Peter kovacs <pe...@apache.org>]

While reading stuff at lunch I come across this article blogspot. Interesting to read what he thinks our flaws are.
Maybe we should work on a solution. 

I think worth reading:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/itsfoss.com/best-free-open-source-alternatives-microsoft-office/amp/

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Re: Best Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux

[Rory O'Farrell <of...@iol.ie>]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2017 12:32:51 +0200
Peter kovacs <pe...@apache.org> wrote:

> 
> While reading stuff at lunch I come across this article blogspot. Interesting to read what he thinks our flaws are.
> Maybe we should work on a solution. 
> 
> I think worth reading:
> https://www.google.com/amp/s/itsfoss.com/best-free-open-source-alternatives-microsoft-office/amp/

The integration of LibreOffice with the various Linux distros was a decision made by the distro managers, for reasons I have never understood - I try to stay away from religious wars!

The download of a LibreOffice installation is about 267 MB,  opposed to about 153 MB for the same operating system.  The larger download does contain all the language variants, but these are probably superfluous to the needs of the average user.  Such download does not include the Help files, which must be downloaded and installed separately.

The cited author mentions Calligra - I tried this using an existing .odt file (50k words of book text, no illustrations or internal tables other than a ToC); it died.

The one advantage I see at present in using LibreOffice (for my purposes) is that LibO's Impress better supports multimedia - specifically video clips; OO4 chokes on these.  I have experimented with installing gstreamer0.10 but could not get OO4 to accept video clips )which ran OK on the system video application).  I have forgotten if OO3 was better behaved - I think not. Staroffice and OO 2.8 were OK.  

Running LibreOffice (ex distro repository) on a fresh install of Xubuntu 16.04.03, when I inserted a video clip, LibO gave helpful prompts about the codecs it needed (gstreamer1.0, which is current) and offered to download and install them.

I have not tried LibO Writer on my work in progress, as OO is very stable and I believe in the old advice that one should not change horses midstream as you'll end up in the water.  

I would urge, for a future release of OO, that Impress should be revised to work with whatever multimedia installation is available on the host operating system; it does not seem logical to me that, if making an advocacy presentation promoting use of OO, one should have to use a different fork to do such a presentation. 

-- 
Rory O'Farrell <of...@iol.ie>

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