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[–] 329 points 8 months ago (21 children)

Apache OpenOffice??

Surely you meant LibreOffice. OpenOffice has basically been dead for years, with no significant work going on.

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  • [–] 63 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Lmao I've been doing a digital forensics class online, and it's always got VMs with ancient versions of software on it, so I got to discover what Apache OpenOffice was. Love that they have to use FOSS to teach us shit since Windows needs a subscription.

    TypoI almost wrote dogital forensics. Is that using dogs to find data? Sniff out that hard drive and get datadumping boy!

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Jesus those images must be 15-20 years old. I guess that's probably still good enough for the basics but there's been a lot of changes since then.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    We're always on some ancient Kali version and Windows XP to 10, and once we used some Linux Distro I'd never heard of in my life. The software is Autopsy, OSForensics, ProDiscover Basic 64, Hex Workshop, and more, a bonus one being IceWeasel (now known as GNU IceCat?). I genuinely want to gouge my eyes out when looking at the old Kali.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    To expand further on your point, here are the releases for Apache Open Office (OO). We are at 4.1.6. the page for 4.1 release was last updated in 2014. It's been mainly small bug fixes since then.

    https://www.openoffice.org/development/releases/

    LibreOffice (LO) and Open Office were essentially the same application at OO 4.0 vs LO 4.1. LO had 3 major releases by 2023 before it went from 7 to 24. With the annual releases it is me difficult to gauge progress in the same way. But we are already at 26.2.

    https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/libreoffice-timeline/

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    It's an older image, not updated.

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  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    OpenOffice was dead before it was transferred to Apache, so it’s not old enough to excuse.

    That Firefox logo is from 2019. Oracle killed OpenOffice in 2011. Like, they actually completely stopped all work on it. They intentionally killed it at least eight years before this image was made.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    LibreOffice has been updated? Interface still looks like it was designed for Windows 95.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    Is there an office suite you had in mind that looks futuristic? Comparing a slightly old version of LibreOffice with a modern version of MS Office... They look pretty similar to me? (The gray document background in libreoffice is from me, it defaults to something closer to MS office).

    Also @bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    I haven't used Apple's suite much, but it's likely that LO could learn something from it, for the simple reason that Apple knows about the principles of grouping in design and thus never subscribed to the approach of β€˜cram lots of buttons in the toolbars without spacing’.

    However, changing the paradigm of the existing UI is probably a big ask.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    Ah, I assumed you were comparing it to MS Office as the gold standard, and chose the tabbed mode to make it closest to that, though I don't personally use it that way myself.

    LibreOffice has a simpler mode, though not quite as bare-bones as your Apple example. It's how I how use it personally:

    There's also a Sidebar mode, which can collapse out of the way when not in use, or be brought back by pressing a small button on the side of the program.

    I agree it could stand to offer a mode with much more spacing and just the essential options, but I think for the most part, the simpler toolbar mode which I use is pretty adequate, and doesn't feel overwhelming to use.

    Alternatively, Libreoffice is quite customizable, so a user can remove every option from the toolbar they never use, and make it appear nicer and less cramped.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    assumed you were comparing it to MS Office

    I'm not the guy to whom you originally replied, so I'm just chiming in with my observations. I would never pose MS' design as anything to aspire to, because MS only recently learned about the principles of grouping, which is very basic design stuff. Their design philosophy for ages consisted of crammed toolbars, crammed lists, and crammed tables.

    Unfortunately, LibreOffice isn't better in this regard, and won't be until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow). Apple's UI is good not because it's β€˜bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through. Other Mac apps are the same way, usually including third-party ones because they follow Apple's guidelines. Btw, iirc the toolbars are typically customizable.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Ah, so you are! My mistake :p

    until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow)

    Like how Firefox lets you drag and drop icons and spacers around? That would be cool to have in Libreoffice.

    Apple’s UI is good not because it’s β€˜bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through.

    Could definitely see that as a big improvement, even as someone quite used to the Windows 95 way of doing things (or at least, I prefer the old way to the ribbon), hopefully someone who has a similar itch to us as well as the capabilities to implement it does so someday :)

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  • [–] 96 points 8 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Will they get away with it? Vee'll see.

    I'll go home now, HEY DON'T PUSH ME

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[58] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[59] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead.[60] Another controversy in July 2021[61] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would "occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA".[62] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added "out of an abundance of caution".[61]

    Awwww... :(

    Hey at least they removed mentioning it in the TOS!

    Yeyyy!... :)

    .....:(

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA

    Which most probably means that if you report a bug, you send them data about your installation and whatever additional data you include, like the email to contact you.

    Lawyers keep stepping on this rake time and again when writing terms and policies.

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  • [–] 88 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    Why on earth is OpenOffice here??

    LibreOffice is the maintained fork.

    It has been that way for 16 years now.

    16 years.

    There are people working full time jobs who were born the same year that LibreOffice started.

    Stop promoting OpenOffice. People will have problems with it that have been long fixed in LibreOffice.

    Edit: typo

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    Tbf I haven't used either extensively (or at least the features I've used in either have been very basic one), but I haven't had any issues with OpenOffice. What are some of the issues you're referring to in OpenOffice? Personally I tend to prefer it because I just think it looks nicer, but clearly there are some issues with it I'm unaware of.

    Edit: Nvm, I'm mixing up OnlyOffice and OpenOffice. Never even heard of OpenOffice before...

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's been over 10 years since I tried it, but at that time it was common for OpenOffice to have compatibility issues with MS office formats, but those issues were already fixed in LibreOffice.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    Isn't that sort of an issue with LibreOffice today though? At least in the sense that there are features in for example Microsoft Word where, if you use them in a document, and then open that document in LibreOffice Writer, it won't render correctly/won't function? I struggle to give you an example because it was a along time since I tried to do that, but I have definitely run into some compatibility issues there, on the side of LibreOffice. Maybe you're referring to something else though?

    Edit: Nvm, I'm mixing up OnlyOffice with OpenOffice. Never used OpenOffice, don't even know what it is.

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  • [–] 68 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Heck, they won’t even let you into a difficult-to-cancel subscription! What are they thinking? Think of the revenue!

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  • [–] 64 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    What people don't always remember about FOSS is they are just making it for themselves they are users as well as devs. The great thing about FOSS is if someone else happens to use it that's great and maybe they will contribute to something they use.

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  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah and they get other devs contributing to their project. Nobody's making Firefox or Blender as a solo project, but band together with some other nerds and this is what you get.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    yeah I recently built myself a music player because I was just so disappointed with all the available options on Linux. Nothing had EVERYTHING I wanted. Many had really crappy shuffles or just didn't include one at all. many just wouldn't play the entirety of your music collection and most simply wouldn't do both online streaming and local music playback. So I built one that's TUI based that does everything I want and it's perfect. Allows me to play music from QoBuz, my Navidrome server, or just local music files OR I can play all three making a "SUPER" music library. Shuffle that ACTUALLY shuffles the ENTIRE collection. search feature, integration with soulseek to download music to either my local machine or navidrome and qobuz search to add to that playlist.

    I'm not going to release it because A. like i said it's perfect for me and B. I dont' want to deal with users git issues or having to deal with other devs wanting to contribute. It works, it's mine, and that's that. will never see the light of day.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Can I ask how you integrated Qobuz? I see they have a locked API and no other obvious way to integrate

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  • [–] 60 points 8 months ago

    Openoffice -> LibreOffice

    Seriously, don't use OpenOffice, it's abandoned for over 10 years.

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  • [–] 118 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    With enshitification nowadays, the fact that they're nonprofit is the reason why the software is good quality.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago

    That's my main issue with windows in particular. Their bad decisions are known to be bad for the user, but in theory good for the shareholders.

    I can accept I'm not the right user for a program or feature, but not that the features are against the users.

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  • [–] 45 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    So many people let perfect be the enemy of good. Firefox is great. It's the pillar of non-Chromium of browsers. Servo and Ladybird are not there yet and will take many years to surpass Firefox if ever. A Firefox fork has a better shot than those 2

    GIMP is great software. Is it just Photoshop and Affinity better than it. Not seeing as much hate on Inkscape when it's just Adobe and Affinity as better.

    OpenOffice is outdated but was good for like ~2010

    A bunch of y'all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.

    Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google's footsteps, and the other I don't particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.

    A bunch of y’all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread

    The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.

    I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole "friend" at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn't have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.

    The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly "Platinum" on Wine's AppDB but would often freeze and didn't support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn't connect online.

    Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can't get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    A Firefox fork has a better shot than those 2

    Yes.

    For example, LibreWolf skipped the AI forced-down-the-throat drama.

    I think maybe LibreWolf only ships with Debian, by default; but it is also in the repositories for Mint, and so I assume also Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    I swear, the biggest obstacle standing in the way of wider open source software adoption is "open source fans" who seem to reflexively hate every open source project out there. Nothing is ever good enough for them

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  • [–] 40 points 8 months ago

    Ok, while most of these don’t have companies behind them with huge revenues, most work on these projects is done by paid developers, with money coming from sponsorships, grants, donations and support deals. (Or in the case of Linux - device drivers are a prerequisite for anyone buying your product).

    Developers getting paid to work on open source is a good thing. These projects may have begun their life as small hobby projects - they aren’t anymore. (And that’s probably good)

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  • [–] 38 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 73 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Where is FreeCad in this one? I've started using it after buying a 3d printer, and it's awesome what that piece of software lets me create.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Got any links to learning? Ive gotten pretty far in fusion360 but am trying to transition and found f360 let's me be too lazy or sketch centric/doesn't require parametric rules

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Ive found it useful to search for a freecad tutorial for any object on YouTube and follow it, making an actual thing. Even if that thing is not of use to me, I learn from building it and use those concepts in what I want to build.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    I wonder if it changed much in the last year. The assembly implementation is what's holding me back. Well, that and staring at cad all day at work already.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I csme in here to see if anyone cared for FreeCAD and yup, here I see you. Love it. And it's better than many proprietary softwares I have tried (edited to remove the names), I mean in terms of hobby creation at least. I am trying so as to master it and create professional level CAD drawings. It's light weight, so beautifully intutive and that it runs smoothly on one of my ancient PCs with 2GB RAM, intel Pentium processor running Windows 7. It's truly awesome. So many add ons, leaves one spoilt for choices.

    Also LibreCAD for 2D.

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  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    firefox? no profit incentive? we wish

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  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago

    Seriously though, thanks to all the FOSS developers out there. I try to donate $5 to $20 where I can, but I k ow that far from what they all deserve!

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago

    Boredom mostly, if their lazy bosses worked them more then they wouldn't have time to be productive at home.

    /s

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago*

    πŸͺŸ: absolutely atrocious. let's do for-profit low quality software instead 😑

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  • [–] 35 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    The biggest selling point of capitalism is innovation.

    That's why nothing was ever invented before capitalism.

    Which makes some wonder how capitalism was invented.

    But they are communists and should be shot for questioning the wisdom of the system.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I've been learning FreeCAD recently and it's pretty incredible too!

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Is FreeCAD good for 3D printing stuff? I started learning fusion but I'm kinda digusted by being tied to autodesk

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    I just started making some headway into using it and I've found it way less intuitive than Fusion. It also seems to be more finnicky about constraints and such. Like I wasn't able to extrude something because I had lines intersecting each other. Just have to be more methodical and use more sketches I guess. Im still on my first project with it though and haven't gotten to the point of printing anything yet though so take that with a grain of salt.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I'd say so! I made some 3D-printed pipes to connect my snake's terrarium extension as my first real project and they turned out pretty good. But I have no comparisons to other CAD software haha

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    Reminds me a local youtuber saying something similar about non-profit companies.

    They said it's human nature to be driven by profit, so non-profits are profiting in some other way. Hence he prefers to give business to for profit companies as you know their intentions.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    IDK, but I'd rather be the beta tester for some open source project, or even contribute code to it (I fixed a language server this way), than to pay premium for a software, which I won't "own", has a bunch of microtransactions, and becomes lower and lower in quality.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    People at the heads of nonprofits are often highly compensated, and it's rare that any of them solve the underlying problem or even make meaningful headway. It's why there is so much "awareness" and short term band aids involved. A nonprofit that solves the problem it's supposedly trying to solve has no reason to exist and will cost people well paying jobs managing it.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Well unfortunately he's right. Most non-profit companies are profiting off of things like your donations and such like that. You look at the Susan g Komen foundation for breast cancer awareness. Something like 5% maybe 10% of all donated funds actually go to breast cancer research. The rest of the funds are used to fund the staff including those that are in charge of the board. And they have massive paydays.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    Blender is far better than anyone not-in-the-know would expect.

    VLC does much more than just play videos, but the user interface inexplicably hides most of the functionality. Also, they've vehemently claimed for many years that it's impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.

    GIMP and Inkscape keep improving, with GIMP being the better of the two. GIMP should just copy Photoshop's interface as closely as possible. There's no shame in that, and Photoshop does many things better. Most users coming to GIMP are coming from Photoshop. (Yes, I'm using PhotoGIMP, but that really doesn't do much to help.)

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago

    I've used Photoshop professionally for 20 years and GIMP for about 3 and, to be fair, both of their default interfaces have have their pros and cons. After spending the 2/3 hours it takes to become proficient in one after being used to the other, the comparison mostly comes down to other things e.g availability of tools, raw performance, enshittification etc.

    Don't get me wrong, there are some things that annoy me about GIMP (like any software), but I'll be recommending versions 3.0 onwards over Photoshop every time. Adjusting to the interface is easily worth it.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Also, they’ve vehemently claimed for many years that it’s impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.

    Ah, so that's not just me, is it? That's bugged me for a long time. I was so happy when I discovered SM Player could do it.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    I don't understand economics but why does there have to always be profit? If someone made devices that last 50 years they would go bankrupt? Make it make sense.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    They don't want some profit, or even sustainable profit. They want all the profit, and always more this quarter than the previous.

    I do understand that if somebody created something that is cheap, lasts forever and there's a limited (non infinite) need for it, they would eventually stop selling. That's why they need to make things last less, or invent excuses to make you buy a new one.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    The capitalist imperative is: make as much profit as you can as fast as you can.

    The fastest way to make as much profit as you can is not to create the best possible product. Sure, that'll get you far enough- but in capitalism there is never "enough". For instance, you could use the capital you amassed to buy up all the competition and create a monopoly and hike prices to whatever you like because people will have no choice but to buy it from you, especially if it's something essential like food, energy, housing, or what have you.

    Of course, monopolies are illegal. Not because capitalism says so, but because society says so, in order to contain capitalism, which would otherwise consume society even faster than it already does!

    Monopolies are just one ugly example, there are other ways of making super much profit super fast. Like, stealing! That, too, is illegal, because it goes against the very concept of living in a society, which itself is predicated on the idea that we are stronger and better and happier when we come together and pool our resources.

    Alas, I wax verbose.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    So basically what it all comes down to is competition and not just greed like most people believe. If you don't make more money than the competition, you will fail. That's why companies keep getting bought out all the time, they lost this game. Most people have no idea just how many companies they know are owned by bigger ones they may not know. The whole thing is conglomerating like the T-1000 after it had been shattered and melted. So rabid profit chasing is a matter of survival.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago*

    That is precisely correct, capitalism is in some sense like a story, I don't remember who wrote it, in which human scientists ask a semi-omnipotent AI to answer some question, and the AI decides that in order to solve it, it needs to transform all the matter in the solar system into an even greater AI, and calmly treats human extinction as an irrelevant side effect.

    "Maximize profit forever" is a bad algorithm if the goal is to sustain a thriving human society. It has no goal state. Just more, forever. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed in its core design and central idea, that somehow, by creating ever more "wealth", everyone gets richer as a whole, while not taking into account the societal effects of some getting vastly richer than others, compounding over time unto infinity.

    I could go on. But capitalism is a fundamentally broken idea that will implode on itself as a matter of causation as it plays out over time, it is logically and physically incapable of sustaining itself. We are seeing the late stage effects of it play out before our eyes right now.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago*

    Funny you should mention that! The Phoebus cartel formed in 1924 by major light bulb manufacturers, because they were at a point where they were producing light bulbs that could last for decades, and they realized that this would kill their profits because nobody would buy bulbs because they lasted so long, so they made rules to deliberately make the bulbs fail after about 1,000 hours and fined members for making bulbs that lasted too long, effectively creating the concept of planned obsolescence as a business model.

    See? Capitalism promotes innovation! In how to profit!

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy

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

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    There is a reason for profits spend a fortune on marketing.

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