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by caboteria 502 days ago
No discussion of LibreOffice would be complete without a reminder that the Apache Foundation continues to harm the open source community by pretending that Apache OpenOffice isn't dead as a doornail.

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

Come on, Apache, admit what we all know to be true, and figure out a way to gently wind the OpenOffice project down.
2 comments
ahoka 502 days ago
Apache is generally a collection of over-engineered abandonware.
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selfhoster 502 days ago
About to start work this morning but I could come up with a list of hundreds of Apache projects in use worldwide across tens of thousands of products in hundreds of thousands of companies.
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cess11 502 days ago
If someone wants to look into this, here are their projects: https://apache.org/index.html#projects-list
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topspin 502 days ago
I just happened to use Calc for the first time in a looong while yesterday. Pretty nice. Fast, conventional, no damn ribbon menus. Saved to office365 format for consumption by others and it was all flawless. It's always been functional, but what I saw yesterday felt pretty polished. Used whatever version is default with Ubuntu 24.04.

So, it's still being actively refined. I think you're maybe a bit too hard on LibreOffice and Apache.

Also, I'll mention something about Thunderbird. Because Snaps, I installed Thunderbird from the official site. I am amazed by this software. Thunderbird is legitimately a nice desktop email client. What amazing progress.

I wondered about updates for Thunderbird, thinking that since I'd done an out-of-band install, I wouldn't get updates. I was astonished to find it's been silently auto-updating itself with zero drama. Kudos.

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i80and 502 days ago
Ubuntu includes LibreOffice, not OpenOffice.

This is the key point of confusion! LibreOffice is great, and is the actively developed piece of software for decades now. OpenOffice is just an old zombie propped up by Apache with no actual work beyond the most trivial maintenance and no purpose beyond confusing people. No Linux distro includes it.

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topspin 502 days ago
I see. I corrected that part before reading your response. Good to understand the actual situation. Yes, I agree. There is no point to OpenOffice any longer.
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