Looking at non-MS 'Office' apps. Recommendations ?

Kestrel · Nov 9, 2015

I'm needing a free 'Office' suite for my new-to-me ThinkPad laptop (w/ Win8.1).

I have read many reviews (there were certainly more viable choices than I was expecting) and it sounds like the closest to what I'm looking for is (Apache) OpenOffice or LibreOffice (v5.0.3 it looks like).

There honestly doesn't seem to be significant differences between the two, but online reviews for both suites always include a few very negative ones (depending on specific versions I suspect) so it's hard to see which of the current iterations might be better.

Please let me know your thoughts, thanks.

Edit: FWIW, I value a 'classic' UI and stability/reliability over the latest features and window dressing. So perhaps not even the latest version then? :thinking:

more_vampires · Nov 9, 2015

Libre Office, IIRC, was a fork of OpenOffice due to some squabble that was pertinent to open source geeks. I recall a bunch of us defecting to Libre in droves.

For the life of me, I can't recall what exactly sparked the code fork and the mass exodus. It was something about management and not really the code, I think.

Anyway, it's hard to go wrong with Libre. I don't understand paying for an office suite in this day and age. It should be a "sufficiently solved problem" by now. Back in the 80s, well, that was different.

Swordforthelord · Nov 9, 2015

I would recommend Libre as well, OpenOffice is not nearly as actively maintained or developed these days.

more_vampires · Nov 9, 2015

Ah HA! Found it.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project/
It was ORACLE (One Real A****** Named Larry Ellison.) I swear that company 100% ruins a sure thing, they do it constantly...

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

Old Larry accidentally bought OOo and threw it away, he just wanted Sun.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community.

Most of the major companies that have historically been involved in OOo development have moved to stand behind TDF and LibreOffice, including Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Canonical. LibreOffice has also succeeded in attracting a significant portion of OOo's independent contributors. The ecosystem-wide shift in favor of LibreOffice has left Oracle as the only major party still developing OOo, forcing the company to compete against the broader community.

Yeah, I remember now. Wow, that was 2011? Sheesh.

Kestrel · Nov 9, 2015

Ok, thanks for the info, interesting article. LO it is then.

BTW thread drift a little, but my first PC 'suite' was the horrible little package called MS Works, the poor-mans' version of MS Word etc (this was back in the days of Windows 3).

Significantly different from Word and cut down in every respect, with proprietary non-ASCII text encoding (or whatever you'd call it) - all sorts of disadvantages with no advantages that I could see. :sick2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works

Before I finally figured out how orphaned that software package really was (compared to my fellow students particularly), I had invested much effort with it including a lot of undergraduate & graduate work.

more_vampires · Nov 9, 2015

OMG! Larry did it again! OOo wasn't the first time. I was wondering what happened to my old Star Office!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before being discontinued in 2011, was a proprietary office suite. It originated in 1985 as StarWriter by StarDivision, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun was itself acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010.

StarOffice supports the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well as the OpenDocument standard, and can generate PDF and Flash formats. It includes templates, a macro recorder, and a software development kit (SDK).
The source code of the suite was released in July 2000, creating a free, open source office suite called OpenOffice.org, which subsequent versions of StarOffice were based on, with additional proprietary components.[3]
In March 2009, a study showed that StarOffice only had a 3% market share in the corporate market.[4]
In April 2011, Oracle announced the discontinuation of Oracle Open Office[1] as part of the decision to turn OpenOffice.org into a "purely community-based project".[5]

At one point, Star Office was sort of the "king" of document compatibility. It was never 100%, but was pretty much the only game for attempting weirdo document intercompatibility. Larry axed Star Office, then neutered OOo for good measure.

Curse you, Larry!

gadget_lover · Nov 9, 2015

In my opinion, the purchase of SUN was not for the hardware, nor Open Office. Sun had hired many of the people behind MySql. Sun was also supporting the MySql development. Buying SUN allowed Oracle to stunt the growth of MySql before it reached the point where the Oracle database software had to mimic MySql. Oracle also bought the Swedish company MySql AB, giving them a stranglehold on their biggest free competitor.

Not that Oracle is evil. I've made a fortune administering their software. I made another administering Sun Hardware / OS.

Dan

Looking at non-MS 'Office' apps. Recommendations ?

Kestrel

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more_vampires

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Swordforthelord

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more_vampires

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Kestrel

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