10 April, 2012

Libre goodies in LO 3.5

A little under a year ago I wrote a happy post about LibreOffice. The team back then showed a strong focus on cleaning up and re-architecturing LibreOffice to make it ready for the future.

Much work

SUSE's Michael Meeks recently made the awesome graph on the right about the stuff being cleaned up from LibreOffice - besides removing a large amount of unused code there has been translating of comments and much other stuff. As I wrote in my previous post: that was (and still is) much needed. Without a lean and mean code base you can't get and keep contributors and making changes takes forever. As say the 3-months GSOC project needed to just get a multi-line edit in Calc shows... And getting contributors is a major goal of LibreOffice - with over 200 new people commiting code, they're quite good at it!

I've had plenty of complaints during the 3.4 series. Stability has been a serious issue. But I do realize that re-factoring and cleaning up takes time and often causes (temporary) issues so I can live with that. And as Meeks said in the announcement of LibreOffice 3.5, we can "now benefit from a substantially cleaner, leaner and more feature rich LibreOffice 3.5.". So I went and downloaded ~600 MB of Free/Libre goodness which is now packaged for openSUSE...

Features

In part thanks to the substantially cleaned code base a number of big improvements can be found in this release. The coolest is imho the grammar check - I know grammar is hard to test but the grammar check has been tuned to have almost zero false positives so if and when it tells you something is wrong, it'll be wrong. The improvements in typography are very noticable as well, fonts look much nicer. And I greatly appreciate the new header/footer interface. Finally, there is the real time word count - I used to use Calligra Words for this feature and its nice to see LO getting it too. Yes, I mostly use writer - can you tell?

But there are plenty of other improvements in the other apps too, including the multi-line input area in Calc so LO 3.5 is certainly a worthy upgrade. I did find a bug, which I have reported ;-)

Speaking off...

On the note of Words - Calligra is on the verge of releasing Calligra 2.4 and I must say that's another FOSS Office release I greatly look forward to, if only due to its about 10 times smaller footprint on my too-tiny SSD ;-)

That release will be even more packed with goodies but then again, it's taken the team about a year to finish it. I especially look forward to Krita, which is now ready for professional artists and from what I've seen of the beta's and RC's it'll be something good enough to make artists move over to Linux. And I'd recommend openSUSE as you can hear Krita lead developer Boud frequently complain that he'd have an easier time supporting users with issues if they'd all just run openSUSE which works flawlessly with tablets.

Getting it

Muktware wrote an article on how to install LO 3.5 in openSUSE but I wasn't particularly looking forward to downloading and installing RPM files by hand so I've waited until a more convenient installation method was available. It is now, just click the link below, give your password and it'll get installed. This works for openSUSE 12.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed users get the upgrade automatically once it is deemed stable enough - the spoils of a Rolling Release... Awesomeness :D

click here for a convenient one-click-installation of LibreOffice 3.5.2 from the LibreOffice-Unstable branch in openSUSE


On an entirely different note, my google plus stream is full of complaints and praise about GNOME Shell which I'm using on my laptop this week (during travel to Nurnberg and Prague). Certainly an interesting experience.

13 comments:

  1. LO KDE integration is shit, please suse fix it.

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    1. Better KDE integration is something that is desperately needed.

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  2. And of course you should've mentioned the STL port work, though I don't know if there are any graphs to back that up. The custom C containers -> STL port was one of the primary goals a year ago, I hope they have finished it, by now.

    Those guys are really brave souls, kudos to them. The OO code is about 20 MLOC IIRC, imagine refactoring that much code, part of which is undocumented and not understood at all because it's a decade or two old and has been unused ever since.

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  3. @Anonymous - LO is better integrated in openSUSE's KDE than in any other distro as we've got a KDE/LO developer doing that. It's still not perfect, I recon, but if you have specific suggestions I'm sure Lubos would love to hear them.

    @Ignat - yes, brave souls indeed :D

    BTW I said 1 year worth of work on Calligra 2.4 but it's actually 2 years even ;-)

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    1. The best suggestion would be to *drop* the integration as a whole, and use the application for what it is. KDE integration has caused and still causes more harm then benefit.

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    2. Hmmm, for me the KDE integration in LO 3.4 has been nice. The integration is mostly a decent file dialog (I hate the GNOME 2.x one with a passion, it's utterly braindead) and reasonabley (>win95) looks... Not sure if there is anything else but these are quite important to me.

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  4. I have been using OOo Calc and its predecessors for over 10 years and was looking forward to the much hyped improvements with LibreOffice. Alas, this has been a major disappointment. Not only is there *still*(!) no decent integration with KDE, but my critcally important spreadsheets run _very slow in LibreOffice. I suspect the developers are not using big spreadsheets, or for anything important. Or they just don't care - this has been the situation for quite some time now.

    I am using Linux (Arch) and am a proponent of open source software, but it is no good if we cannot rely on developers to deliver stable, predictable apps. As it is, it is actually ruinous!

    Lastly, if it is true that KDE-integration is working under SUSE, that is a disgrace from a Linux community POV! Think about it...

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    1. I don't get the disgrace thing? If SUSE develops LO integration for KDE, what is wrong with that? You think we don't push it upstream? Ever looked at who DEVELOPS LibreOffice? That's SUSE, yes, we're the single biggest contributor. Of course what we do is DONE upstream...

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    2. Sorry for late reply.

      No, you apparently did not get the point, which is that LO's KDE integration has not worked/been functional over the last four years, if ever. At least not under the Linux distros I have been using. If it is now working under SUSE, and yet still not under other Linux flavours, that's indeed a disgrace. Mildly put. Which of the parties involved should bear (the most) blame for this sorry state of affairs, is irrelevant to the users. We need applications that work as advertized.

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    3. So ArchLinux breaks the KDE integration in LibreOffice (which was developed by openSUSE, pushed upstream in LibreOffice to make it available for other distro's) and you try to blame us for doing a crappy job? Fix it yourself or complain to the Arch people, dude... We can't fix every Linux distro out there!

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    4. If it isn't working under Arch, I doubt it is working under any distro - save perhaps for openSUSE. However, I haven't tested the very latest LO incantation, and I am not going to unless LO becomes way snappier. Since last November both OOo and LO have been unable to handle my spreadsheets at an acceptable speed. Funny how something which has been working _acceptably for nearly ten years can suddenly turn practically unusable. Of course I've had to find a solution myself, as with the missing KDE integration before.

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  5. Any idea if embedding fonts is possible in the new LO?

    It's difficult to create a document/presentation in LO and have the receiving side seeing something different (layout, presentation, garbled text) just because they are using Windows, like school works and workplaces.

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    1. I haven't seen that function, I'm afraid it's not there still :(

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