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A comment on French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%". Parent comment

Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by Pxtl on Monday September 30, 2013 @12:20PM (#6470409)
The biggest problem comparing open/libreoffice is that compatibility is 99% of the focus here. Trying to implement Microsoft's horrible file-formats just sucks all the oxygen out of the room - the users obsess over compatibility (for good reasons), and that means the developers have to obsess over compatibility (also for good reasons) but this makes it really hard for LibreOffice to actually focus on real features.

Also, as an aside, my wife's learning LaTeX for some math courses... she was shocked at how well her OOO Draw files could be converted and opened up in Inkscape, which in turn played nice with LaTeX. Having good compatibility between various small applications actually was surprising to someone used to the closed-source software world.

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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by slacka on Monday September 30, 2013 @01:38PM (#6470981)
As someone who was part of a failed LibreOffice roll-out, I have to agree in my experience compatibility is the issue holding LO back. But users don't obsess, they just require decent interoperability. If basic features like charts can't be imported[1], of course it's a showstopper.

I have to disagree with everyone here saying that basic MSO interoperability is some impossible goal. If that was the case how has TextMaker achieved such better results?[2] LibreOffice and OpenOffice both have a group of paid developers. While I understand that volunteer wouldn't want to work on this, why can't the paid developers put some effort into this?

[1] https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=96426

[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility...

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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by orr721 on Monday September 30, 2013 @04:22PM (#6472111)
In my experience since version 4.0 the compatibility of LibreOffice Writer increased considerably. I do not have any problems with MS Word documents for quite some time. YMMV of course..

The compatibility test mentioned above [2] was performed in 2009. According to the LibreOffice release notes a lot of the positioning errors were fixed.

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fix...

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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by slacka on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @05:16AM (#6475041)
Saying that the tests were performed in 2009 and LO team claims to have improved compatibility doesn't prove anything. In fact, if you had dug a little deeper, you would have seen that 3 out of 4 of those 2009 bugs are still open.[1][2][3] The first 2 come directly from the report, the 3rd is a long outstanding bug that goes back to OO 2.0.

I don't know how you can claim that there are no serious problems with compatibility when you can't even import word docs that have charts or diagrams in them. This is stuff I was doing for my lab reports in HS and our marketing documents are full of this kind of material. These are not esoterica features we're talking about.

In a vacuum, LibreOffice / OpenOffice are perfectly usable word processors. In fact I prefer the LO UI over MSO's ribbon interface. The problem is MSO is the industry standard. So until they take compatibility seriously, they are going to be relegated to home users.

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65865

[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66058

[3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58521

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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by davidgerard on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @05:07PM (#6517862)
Upvote for linking the bug reports with test documents, by the way - so many compatibility complainants don't actually produce the bugs.
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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by andybak on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @05:07AM (#6475015)
Is there a writeup of your 'failed LibreOffice roll-out' anywhere? I love reading the details of that kind of thing and I'm sure others do too.
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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by pachydermic on Monday September 30, 2013 @01:12PM (#6470799)
Do you know about LyX? I loved that program for my math classes (mostly proof writing). Personally, I liked the shortcuts it provided so that I didn't have to write raw LaTeX for everything.
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Re:French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%" by shequi on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @08:48AM (#6475728)
Have you (either of you) tried LaTeXiT[1]? As a gui interface/equation editor it helped me texify my stats submissions and also helped as a quick reference for some of those characters I don't use regularly.

[1] http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/latexit/latexit-home.php?lang=...

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