On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 13:26 -0500, John W Foster wrote: > 1. Why is Debian switching to LibreOffice, per the posting I saw a few > days ago? From what I read and heard, most distributions switched, or are in the process of switching. It also appears most of the developers are behind LibreOffice, which has gained quite a number of new developers, cleaning up the code. You should read up on why LibreOffice has forked from OpenOffice. A short history can be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History But I'm sure others can give a much more detailed explanation. > 2. Is OpenOffice still going to be supported? It is my understanding that OpenOffice will still be supported (security updates) for Debian stable (Lenny) until it is EOL. No new versions will be introduced as these are replaced in Debian with LibreOffice > 3. What makes LibreOffice better than OpenOffice? It is supposed to be faster, has more bugs fixed, and so on. It also appears to me much more active in development than OpenOffice. > > These questions are not intended to start a flame war! I have never even > looked at LibreOffice, as I did not need to. Now I'm concerned that a > large body of work covering several years will have to be 'ported' to a > new format & that I will have to learn a lot of new stuff. I wouldn't worry to much about that, LibreOffice is effectively a fork of OpenOffice.org, both go their separate ways from that point on, but much will remain the same at first, such as the format in which documents are saved. The user interface has changed a bit, but not dramatically, I doubt it you'll see the difference at first, some dialogs have changed a bit, but most people seem to agree that is for the better. In my experience (I run Debian testing with LibreOffice) you can see LibreOffice as a major upgrade of OpenOffice itself. You don't need to worry about any existing documents, or learning a new user interface. As a user, you won't notice the difference at first (apart from the name change), it appears as just a new version of your existing office suite, getting faster, new features and it keeps improving. > Any rational comments are appreciated. > Thanks! > Frosty > Kind regards, Steven
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