The companies I work at are all using either Google Docs or Office 365. The collaboration benefits are pretty immense, and can save people a lot of synchronization and communication effort. Most my colleagues see oldschool desktop document editing software as obsolete and frustrating to work with.

Yeah. Cloud office tooling has won, at this point. There will always be a handful of (mostly spreadsheet) users who insist on doing things locally, but at this stage that is emphatically a small minority. And of that market, LibreOffice has captured essentially none of it.

If you're collaborating with other people (with some narrow exceptions), the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying. And, to your point, LibreOffice is from an era when providing a plausible alternative to Microsoft desktop products was a big deal. It really isn't at this point. Mainstream users use cloud-based options and specific power users use Microsoft Office.

> the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying

The idea that Google has every startup’s term sheet, plans, budgets, is really strange to me. USA can so easily spy on every other country’s data.

Am I the last dinosaur? Are all the other concerns dead?

No, you are not. This is truely strange.

I can understand giving away grocery lists to the world, but not this.

I mean, at Google scale the investors in global capital all know each other and invest in each other’s funds anyway.

And most customer lists are on Salesforce. ADP has everyone's salary data. At the end of the day, the safe thing is to just disconnect all your computers from the internet. But that's not very practical so you decide how much of your company's time and energy you want to devote to reducing potential security exposure while your competitors are just taking advantage of available online services (with some level of security due diligence).

Fortunately you can work on shared cloud documents while still having more features and the faster response of local applications. I often work with local Excel or Powerpoint apps on cloud documents while another colleague is working on the same document. If I need to share the document, I just add someone to the share list. If someone emails me a document to work on I switch it to a cloud document and then share it back to them to try to change their habits of sending out discrete copies of documents.

For Office 365 I totally see how it renders LibreOffice like local monolithic obsolete.

On Google Docs though, it's limited enough to hit some roadblock every now and then. Last time it was a gigantic csv that took forever to render as a spreadsheet. Other times it was formatting problems that made the document unusable. It's rare, but happens enough to warrant an alternative local office suite to deal with the exceptions.

It's just not shipping by default, I don't think they're removing it from their repositories, so you can still install it if you want

I think that's an optimistic read of their short and vague statement. Someone has to do the work of packaging it and if they're stepping back (for both RHEL and Fedora), who will do the work?

The LibreOffice project themselves package up .rpms for their project and distribute them.

The volunteers who maintain thousands of other packages?

Even as casual user who once in a while wanted to open and manipulate csvs in libreoffice I was hitting issues and it even straight died on me couple times. I dropped the attempts to use it after couple days

Cool which one of those is libre?

Exactly. These SaaS solutions are way less (speech) free, with anything you write being a accessible to various powerful entities depending on legal jurisdiction you reside in.

A few years ago, Google Docs restricted access to a family member's documents for 'suspected copyright infringement'. When asked about this, I could not find an infringement, and even if there was one it may have been permitted under the exception to copyright afforded to 'educational establishments' in the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act here in Britain (the relative was a teacher).

Thus, another problem is the SaaS providers ignoring the legal jurisdiction you reside in, and restricting technically rights you have legally!

Furthermore, Libre Office is not the slickest software, nor do they listen to their users. For about a decade people have been asking, Wth do you mean, I can't select multiple images in a doc and move them?! The team's response remains, You're not supposed to do it that way, you must first smush all your images down into one, then import and move that. This prescribes a waterfall model of doc creation; they're admitting Write stifles experimentation and creativity. Just a rotten UX and a rotten attitude. They should get better or get lost.

I would get mad over this stuff 10 years ago but it feels a bit strange to complain about libreoffice`s broken ux in 2023.

People who claim libreoffice can replace office remind me a bit of people who claim gimp can replace photoshop, or inkscape could replace illustrator. Laughable

inkscape is good though. I've never used illustrator, so I have no idea if it could replace it, but it's not fair to lump inkscape in with gimp

The former has tons of plausible alternatives which are already more frequently used than LibreOffice - and of course you can still use LibreOffice via Flatpak anyways.

The latter is a hard requirement to doing serious media editing work on Linux regardless of what software you want to use. And unlike the former, there's a dedicated customer base that wants it.

There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle.

LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas.

It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.

Nobody is getting rid of LibreOffice, it's only a question of whether it is supported directly by Red Hat as part of the base install and repos.

Only the color sensitive part is exclusively related to image and video editing. It's an interesting question, over the past few years I've only sparsely done document editing in anything but Google Docs (which I still find absolutely terrible). Most of the "documents" I write goes into systems such as Confluence or various wikis, rarely do a produce an actual document in a word processor.

I might be completely wrong, but it seems like word processing is becoming a bit niche, something limited to legal and sales teams.

Could you expand on the Google docs comment?

I tend to prefer Google over other docs tools. Occasionally I hear that people feel it's terrible, but I don't understand why. Would you mind sharing a few things that bug you the most?

+1 the collaboration features of Google docs are so good, does not have feature parity with say MS Word, but I have not missed local apps

Line wrapping is often different between different browsers, so things end up on different pages for different users.

Document management is probably the thing that bothers me the most. Once a document is in Google Docs, it's basically impossible to find again, unless you link to it from somewhere else. Documents is some weird hybrid document/webpage/wiki thing. I hate that it doesn't have save button, completely breaks my workflow that it saves everything all the time. Sure I can make a copy, but how to I replace the original document afterward?

Finally, person preference, I don't like browser based apps. I get lost if I have more than two browser windows and five tabs open, why would I want yet another thing running in the browser then?

I generally like Google Docs and find it does a good job of implementing the feature set that most people actually need without a lot of the cruft you find in something like Microsoft Office. And I'm minimally organized enough I can usually find my own documents without much trouble.

I'll sort of agree with a couple of your points though.

Better version control would be appreciated. I had a problem just this past week because I was extensively rewriting someone else's doc and I felt I needed to work on a copy to straightforwardly preserve the original. And this ended up causing confusion.

Searching for the right "shared with me" document out of the hundreds that get shared on a regular basis--many of them routine meeting agendas and that sort of thing--is really hard and I regularly have to try to figure out who the owner is and other characteristics that will let me track it down.

Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use. Yesterday I was reading Becker's Writing for Social Scientists, 2nd ed. This is a 2007 revision of a book originally published in 1986, and includes at chapter titled "Writing with Computers" which includes much of the chapter "Friction and Word Processors" from the 1986 edition. I recall a moment of bemusement realizing how archaic the term "word processor" sounded to my ear.

>Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use.

You're probably right. I'd probably just say I'll write something up or I'll share a Google Doc or something along those lines. And we'd just create "some slides" or "a slide deck" and no one would imagine for a second we were going to create actual 35mm slides. We still use "spreadsheet" though.

I just don't understand this kind of comment. I've used Google docs for many years with dozens of collaborators. Could it be better? Sure. But "absolutely terrible"? That sort of comment makes it hard to take any other part of the comment seriously.

What's more important for RH's paying customers? Apparently their movie industry contracts are the ones keeping the lights on for the desktop group...

That's a false comparison. You can still edit documents using LibreOffice installed via flatpak, or, like probably most users, use Google Docs, Office 365, or OnlyOffice.

Meanwhile without proper HDR support and better color management, Linux desktop is basically a non-starter for any professional creative use-case, including design, animation, illustration, image and video editing.

Ideally both would be done but they seem to have limited resources, so in this scenario I personally fully support their choice as it will enable Linux desktop usage to a whole new user-base (which is also a paying user-base, namely animation studios that use RHEL).

If they have real studios using it I'm guessing this just means plug and play HDR support? As opposed some previously working set up requiring tweaking it yourself?

No, HDR basically doesn't exist on Linux at this stage. I believe there's some (insufficient) scaffolding in the kernel for it, but no support in the common display stacks.

To my knowledge, there was no working HDR of any kind until the last year, when Valve hacked in hardware-specific HDR into Gamescope, and even that only works if you really get your hands dirty.

Last month there was a hackathon with all the big players (Valve, AMD, Nvidia, KDE, Red Hat, Wayland) to finally settle on a plan for universal compositor HDR implementation.

In 2023? I would argue image/video editing for sure.

My vote would be replacing the dumpster fire that X currently is. Everyone would benefit from that.

Image and video editing. The vast majority of VFX shops run on RHEL/ Alma. I expect the microscopic fraction of users who use desktop Linux, then the even more microscopic fraction of users who use Linux for Libre Office is just not worth supporting over other more important things.

Besides, I think you can just install Libre Office using Flatpak.

Gamers want HDR too.

Of course one could argue that the hardcore Linux (er, GNU/Linux) document creator will use Emacs with AUCTeX (or canny uses of org-mode), with rendering via XeTeX/LaTeX/LuaTeX... Or markdown piped through pandoc, for those who want to take it easy.

LibreOffice, it's a slippery slope... Next thing we'll be using the mouse and ditching the tiled window manager.

Wayland/HDR etc is much more important for those who need it than using LibreOffice (which still will be available) when there are plenty of online solutions that work fine

They work fine if you don't give a shit about your privacy.

X is horrible from a security perspective. It has heaps of baggage from back before that was a concern.

Maybe Wayland isn’t it, but a replacement would definitely benefit everyone.