TLWIR 46: Limerick Loves LibreOffice

"Where there is a will, there is a way"

I believe most wrongly think that the cost savings aren't worth the effort or flat out lazy. It might take a generation of IT management before they see the light and realize the benefits.

Many IT managers are too busy trying to keep their Windows stable and afraid to shake the boat.

There will always be companies that think spending money on proprietary software is a given, but there will be many that don't want to spend anything. The PCs come with Windows, so technically it's a hardware line item. Nothing comes out of the software budget. So they have a very small or nonexistent software budget. And then all the free-for-Windows applications come into play, chief among them LO/OO.

We're about to move a CMS from a proprietary application with clients that run on Windows XP only (we're running them in an XP VM in Win 7 now ...) to a hosted application we access via Citrix. Technically we won't even need Win 7. The Citrix Receiver client runs on just about anything.

I finally got the admin to install all my favorite FOSS apps for Windows -- FileZilla, GIMP, Notepad++, Inkscape, VLC, plus a few more that escape me right now. I'm also trying out the newish Lightworks video editor and waiting until I can run it in Linux as well.

Out in the real world, away from the echo chamber we're all in here, FOSS apps that run in Windows are huge. I bet the number of OO/LO deployments in Windows is many orders of magnitude larger than the number of total Linux desktop deployments, whether they use OO/LO or not.

I agree Steven,

In the year or so I was still running Windows before switching over to Linux full time I was running everything I could find that would run on Windows.

Quoting:We're all getting OO at my shop. They had OO before the LO split and are staying with it now.

I know within the Linux community LO has the mindshare and the momentum, but I actually see more OO out in business. It makes sense, too, since the latest Apache OO does do a better job with Microsoft .docx files than LO. If you don't need to deal with .docx and can make do with .doc or nothing from MS then LO is probably the better choice at this point.

Quoting:FOSS apps that run in Windows are huge. I bet the number of OO/LO deployments in Windows is many orders of magnitude larger than the number of total Linux desktop deployments, whether they use OO/LO or not.

I agree completely. Having said that, I still think the Linux share of the desktop is way under reported and underestimated. A lot of enterprise systems have restricted net access or no Internet access at all. They don't how up on web counters. They are real and genuine Linux desktops anyway.

> I agree completely. Having said that, I still think the Linux share of the desktop is way under reported and underestimated.

Yes. But even if we grant that Linux is somewhere in the 5% range, and that Macs are somewhere in the 5-10% range, and allow another 5% for an other category, that still leaves 80+% of the existing base as Windows machines. There's simply a much larger market for Windows apps, even FOSS ones.

Quoting:Yes. But even if we grant that Linux is somewhere in the 5% range,

In an article I wrote two years ago I gave adequate math to show that, based on existing reports, the share was at least 8%. I don't think that number has gone down. Quite the contrary. Of course, I think "other" is probably <1%, so the rest of your statement is accurate AFAICT.

Quoting:that still leaves 80+% of the existing base as Windows machines. There's simply a much larger market for Windows apps, even FOSS ones.

80% is the number I usually guesstimate for Windows, but even if it's down to 70-75% (which I doubt) you'd be 100% right.

Yes, the exact number can be argued ad infinitum (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if yours weren't closer than mine), but the math is inescapable no matter the exact figures.

I've had to do a bunch of application installations on Windows 7 machines in the last week. It's hell. Sh*tty installers, cr@pware, incompatibility ... awful.

I have one Windows app -- IrfanView -- that runs better in Debian with Wine on a PC with 1/3rd the specs than it does in Win 7.

Why would you subject yourself to Windows if you didn't have to?

> Why would you subject yourself to Windows if you didn't have to?

One and only one reason: Someone pays me to.

I have to say that as someone who uses Excel quite a bit in my daily job Libreoffice isn't quite up to the task. I have had it nearly grind my desktop to a halt with rather simple vlookups. I think for certain use cases LO is sufficient.

I deal with large data dumps, and Excel is more robust when you get a huge file. LO/OO is catching up, but MS really stepped it up for Excel when they expanded the program's capacity to something like a million rows per sheet.

Quoting:One and only one reason: Someone pays me to.

Sanity? Paycheck? Sanity? Paycheck?

I hate making tough decisions.

Since the topic has come up, how do you guys feel about Gnumeric ?

Quoting:Sanity? Paycheck? Sanity? Paycheck?

Gotta make bank, home biscuit.

Due to my company's new infatuation with Google/Docs/Drive/Spreadsheet, I'm using it more and more because of the seamless collaboration.

Doesn't your company have some security/privacy/confidentiality concerns when they put their internal data on Google servers?

Quoting:Doesn't your company have some security/privacy/confidentiality concerns when they put their internal data on Google servers?

I guess they're OK with it.

Quoting:Since the topic has come up, how do you guys feel about Gnumeric ?

Not a guy per se, but... I rather like it for simple spreadsheets. It also does a reasonably good job with simple Excel files. It's lightweight so it's a good choice for older or limited systems. It doesn't do so well with really large or complex spreadsheets or macros.

"It doesn't do so well with really large or complex spreadsheets or macros."

That does seem to be the special place in which Excel resides.

It's a funny thing. I suppose there are better tools for dealing with large data sets, but a lot of us get big .xls files -- government agencies dump them on us all the time. Not often enough, though -- what I usually get is a 300-page PDF that was an .xls at one point. I'd rather have the .xls.