this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
14 points (88.9% liked)

Linux

47323 readers
927 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
all 15 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] scoredseqrica@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Short version: no they didn’t.

Long version: maybe. Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice. This is a good thing. There is already a flatpack available, and this is the recommended route to getting the latest and greatest version. Additional this saved dev time from pointlessly compiling packages that are already available as flatpacks. However they are also taking people off libreoffice development and onto other things like HDR support and wayland issues. This will in the long term hurt libreoffice. To be honest, on balance this is probably a good thing.

Libreoffice is a great personal office environment, however it’s sorely lacking for enterprise use, where MS office compatability, multi user simultaneous collaboration and power user features (powerquery etc) are king. Things that libreoffice, with the greatest respect, sucks at.

Given this and that fedora is an upstream for RHEL, it doesn’t make sense for Redhat to put effort into an office suite its consumers won’t use, in favour of making other desktop features that users will use better instead.

[–] carlwgeorge@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice.

Yes, we are. The latest build was two days ago.

Fedora is a community distro. Any software that follows the packaging guidelines can be packaged by whoever is willing to maintain it. Fedora doesn't block people from maintaining RPMs just because a flatpak is a available, like Canonical does with snaps in Ubuntu.

Previously, the RHEL LibreOffice maintainers also maintained it in Fedora. This is common for the subset of Fedora packages (~10%) that are also in RHEL. RHEL deprecated LO, meaning it's still in current RHEL versions but won't be in a future major version. Because of that the RHEL maintainers orphaned the Fedora package and its dependencies. Pretty much immediately, Fedora community members adopted the packages to keep them around. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

[–] scoredseqrica@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good point well made. I should have been specific by pointing out that it’s only the Redhat devs that are no longer packaging RPM versions, the community is obviously free to maintain any packages it wishes (within project rules), and have adopted LibreOffice.

[–] carlwgeorge@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

No worries, there is a bit of nuance to it that can be easy mix up. People often make the mistake of thinking Fedora == Red Hat. Red Hat folks are certainly involved, but Fedora does have a healthy amount of independence too. The best example of this is the fact that Fedora uses btrfs as the default filesystem, while it's disabled entirely in RHEL.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Long version: maybe. Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice. This is a good thing.

Whi is it a good thing?

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 1 points 1 year ago

They can spend that time doing other things to help the distro.

[–] Agility0971@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

They didn't. LibreOffice devs wanted to provide support exclusively through Flatpak. Thus making native installations not supported. In stead of spending time on maintaining native package they just tell users to use Flatpak. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/46ZZ6GZ2W3G4OJYX3BIWTAW75H37TVW6/

[–] guyman@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dang, that's lame. I guess it's up to users to adapt LO to their distro.

[–] Agility0971@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] Raphael@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

He's a flatpak reactionary, probably an arch user.

[–] Agility0971@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Not all Arch users are the same I guess.

I use arch btw

[–] Czele@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

possibly artix, without any init system (he start processes by hand)

[–] dlarge6510@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago

Many like myself don't like the old idea of downloading stuff that "just runs". It's too much going back to the old ways with windows where you randomly just downloaded a binary off a website and ran it.

Basically it's the equivalent of sideloading apps on mobile devices. I won't do that either unless it is required.

Now I do have one such app, in appimage which is my preference anyway. KDEnlive, which I run as an appimage Vs the Debian package only because I'm on Debian 10 on my main machine and have yet to pencil in the upgrade time.

Now, GNU Guix is interesting. Cryptographically secure and verified compilation (or pre-compilation) of source code straight from GitHub etc. Now, that will be more like it!

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 1 points 1 year ago

Good for them. It seems bonkers that so much time and effort is spent by distros recompiling and packaging programs that are used across many distros.

It just makes more sense for app developers to do this work once and then just drop it on any distro and have it work.