this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Last week i saw a couple of times that "Fedora killed libre office" but still don't understand why and how. Someone is so kind to explain that to me? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Short version: no they didn’t.

Long version: maybe. Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice. This is a good thing. There is already a flatpack available, and this is the recommended route to getting the latest and greatest version. Additional this saved dev time from pointlessly compiling packages that are already available as flatpacks. However they are also taking people off libreoffice development and onto other things like HDR support and wayland issues. This will in the long term hurt libreoffice. To be honest, on balance this is probably a good thing.

Libreoffice is a great personal office environment, however it’s sorely lacking for enterprise use, where MS office compatability, multi user simultaneous collaboration and power user features (powerquery etc) are king. Things that libreoffice, with the greatest respect, sucks at.

Given this and that fedora is an upstream for RHEL, it doesn’t make sense for Redhat to put effort into an office suite its consumers won’t use, in favour of making other desktop features that users will use better instead.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice.

Yes, we are. The latest build was two days ago.

Fedora is a community distro. Any software that follows the packaging guidelines can be packaged by whoever is willing to maintain it. Fedora doesn't block people from maintaining RPMs just because a flatpak is a available, like Canonical does with snaps in Ubuntu.

Previously, the RHEL LibreOffice maintainers also maintained it in Fedora. This is common for the subset of Fedora packages (~10%) that are also in RHEL. RHEL deprecated LO, meaning it's still in current RHEL versions but won't be in a future major version. Because of that the RHEL maintainers orphaned the Fedora package and its dependencies. Pretty much immediately, Fedora community members adopted the packages to keep them around. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good point well made. I should have been specific by pointing out that it’s only the Redhat devs that are no longer packaging RPM versions, the community is obviously free to maintain any packages it wishes (within project rules), and have adopted LibreOffice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No worries, there is a bit of nuance to it that can be easy mix up. People often make the mistake of thinking Fedora == Red Hat. Red Hat folks are certainly involved, but Fedora does have a healthy amount of independence too. The best example of this is the fact that Fedora uses btrfs as the default filesystem, while it's disabled entirely in RHEL.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

They didn't. LibreOffice devs wanted to provide support exclusively through Flatpak. Thus making native installations not supported. In stead of spending time on maintaining native package they just tell users to use Flatpak. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dang, that's lame. I guess it's up to users to adapt LO to their distro.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

why is this lame?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He's a flatpak reactionary, probably an arch user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not all Arch users are the same I guess.

I use arch btw

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Many like myself don't like the old idea of downloading stuff that "just runs". It's too much going back to the old ways with windows where you randomly just downloaded a binary off a website and ran it.

Basically it's the equivalent of sideloading apps on mobile devices. I won't do that either unless it is required.

Now I do have one such app, in appimage which is my preference anyway. KDEnlive, which I run as an appimage Vs the Debian package only because I'm on Debian 10 on my main machine and have yet to pencil in the upgrade time.

Now, GNU Guix is interesting. Cryptographically secure and verified compilation (or pre-compilation) of source code straight from GitHub etc. Now, that will be more like it!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You wouldn't go to a website and download something (unlike AppImage), you would install it through Flatpak.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Appimage IS an attempt to bring windows style software (mis)management to windows. Flatpak is more like bringing android style app management along with limited permission sets, permission portals, and some sandboxing. It also leverages the server spaces container principals more and more to do!

Guix is also super cool! In fact using guix to build OCI containers and flatpaks to me is natural evolution of the declarative/reproduce able image concepts introduced by both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well yes, that's usually how it happens

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Fedora didn't do anything to Libreoffice. Red Hat had been the maintainer for the Libreoffice packages in Fedora up until a couple of weeks ago. The package became an orphan, and without anyone to maintain it, would end up being dropped from the distribution. For the time being, it looks like some people from the community have stepped up to maintain Libreoffice in Fedora.

So unless something happens and the current maintainers are unable to keep up, nothing should happen to Libreoffice in Fedora.

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