this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 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.

[–] [email protected] 34 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Will Fedora ever support Stratis on install like RHEL does?

[–] jerrimu 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

Whi is it a good thing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

See the rest of the post.

Dev time is zero sum. If you work on or spend money on one thing, you can’t also be working that same time on or spending that same money on another thing. So on balance spending the limited time / money on the desktop environment that everyone uses is probably better than spending that same time or money on LibreOffice, which although itself a worthy product has its own developers and is not a product everyone uses. And if you can save that time and still provide the product anyway though a flatpack, well that’s a pretty good deal!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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