[PLUG] OO.o vs. LO

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2011 14:27:18 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>From one comparison I read it appears the fork is based on personality
>difference, but I may well be mistaken in my impression. I know that
>Sun Office is a commercial product now owned by Oracle, but I thought
>that OO.o was still F/OSS.
>
>Since I'm having problems printing envelopes with OO.o-3.x I thought I'd
>give LO a try to see if it does better.

The reasons for the fork were not personality, rather, it was Oracle's
purchase of Sun that spurred the move. However, there had long been
discontent among developers with things that Sun was doing. The Oracle
deal was just the tipping point.

I haven't switched. Part of the reason for that is that my (dim)
understanding is that LO is built basically on the Go build of OOo.
According to the spin on LO's website this gives LO "enhancements." But
Go left a bad taste in my mouth more than once. Frequently there were
features that were disabled. Sometimes they were trivial, but still
stupid. For example, in OOo 2.2 after saving a file the Save option in
File > Save was no longer grayed out. It was explained to me that the
Go people decided to disable this because MS Office doesn't gray out
the Save button, and they wanted OOo to look more like MS Office. How
stupid is that?

Another case was installing OOo in Fedora from the repositories,
another instance of the Go build. Later I discovered that Autocorrect
had been completely removed. I was told that the Autocorrect feature
contained proprietary code from Sun and Fedora refused to include it.

I have long read the OOo e-list, and I continually see the gurus
suggesting that a user's problems would be solved by installing the
real OOo instead of the version in their distro's repositories. There
is no love lost on the Go builds.

The Autocorrect experience was the last straw. Ever since I have used
only the version from OOo. Everything works, and if it doesn't, I know
exactly who to blame.

I suppose eventually I'll go to LO. But I'm in no rush.

Oh, and I can print envelopes to my Laserjet 4+ without a problem. The
Laserjet 5 is not very different. If you think it might be a driver
problem, I wonder what would happen if you installed the driver for the
4+.

I do admit that after upgrading recently from 3.2.1 to 3.3.0 there has
been an issue with printing, i.e., when printing multiple copies
collated of a print job with an uneven number of pages it starts page 1
of the second job on the back of the last page of the first copy.