Hacker News Reader

Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

This. Name natters. IME 90% of people I know who want to quickly look through a PowerPoint on Linux will install OpenOffice. Even when they hear that libre is the better version 80% of them would stay with oo as it is the "real" oo.

View on HN

Also, 85% of statistics are made up on the spot based upon anecdotal data.

I agree in the case of the Windows/OS X environment, where brand awareness of LibreOffice is low, but in the Linux world... my distribution (Debian) doesn't even package OpenOffice, and I don't know any Linux user who uses OOo.

Here's one. Never thought it necessary to change. OO works just fine.

ditto

Wasn't OpenOffice own by Sunacle at some point?

I think that's when a lot of users moves to LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is original OO, in terms of continuity of development, more so than AOO is.

And another one to some extent: oOo uses its own font rendering, the LO team (I gather) moved over to using libraries (harfbuzz) available in host OS for font rendering. I seem to have better results on former under some circumstances.

I have not had any round-trip editing problems flitting between the two under Linuxen of various kinds.

I didnt know this but at a more general level I am reluctant to "upgrade" what's already working fine due to this very fiddling with new stuff which is a common failing of the FOSS model in my experience (people wanting to add shiny things instead of making existing stuff better - Firefox, GNOME etc). This is one of the main reasons I did not migrate to LO.

Are you using a distro from 2010? Because I believe most of the major Linux distros include LIbreOffice as part of the default install.

I just checked - the latest I use is centos 7.1 which does have libreoffice already installed, however my daily machine is older and I had to install OO manually there.

and I don't know any Linux user who uses OOo.

Pleased to meet you. Now you know at least one.

So true. For example, when Node.js forked to io.js, even after a year where io.js was clearly a superior product, 90% of developers were still using Node.js. Old habits die hard, I guess.

> IME 90% of people I know who want to quickly look through a PowerPoint on Linux will install OpenOffice.

If that's all you need to do, OpenOffice will likely work just fine for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com