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The OP is burying the lede! The exciting news [0] is > We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, b

• pmoriarty 3y ago
  What's more important for most users, document editing or image/video editing?
  • dralley 3y ago
    The former has tons of plausible alternatives which are already more frequently used than LibreOffice - and of course you can still use LibreOffice via Flatpak anyways. The latter is a hard requirement to doing serious media editing work on Linux regardless of what software you want to use. And unlike the former, there's a dedicated customer base that wants it.
    • supportlocal4h 3y ago
      There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle. LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas. It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.
      • dralley 3y ago
        Nobody is getting rid of LibreOffice, it's only a question of whether it is supported directly by Red Hat as part of the base install and repos.
  • mrweasel 3y ago
    Only the color sensitive part is exclusively related to image and video editing. It's an interesting question, over the past few years I've only sparsely done document editing in anything but Google Docs (which I still find absolutely terrible). Most of the "documents" I write goes into systems such as Confluence or various wikis, rarely do a produce an actual document in a word processor. I might be completely wrong, but it seems like word processing is becoming a bit niche, something limited to legal and sales teams.
    • cripblip 3y ago
      Could you expand on the Google docs comment?
    • cjmcqueen 3y ago
      I tend to prefer Google over other docs tools. Occasionally I hear that people feel it's terrible, but I don't understand why. Would you mind sharing a few things that bug you the most?
      • cripblip 3y ago
        +1 the collaboration features of Google docs are so good, does not have feature parity with say MS Word, but I have not missed local apps
      • jahewson 3y ago
        Line wrapping is often different between different browsers, so things end up on different pages for different users.
      • mrweasel 3y ago
        Document management is probably the thing that bothers me the most. Once a document is in Google Docs, it's basically impossible to find again, unless you link to it from somewhere else. Documents is some weird hybrid document/webpage/wiki thing. I hate that it doesn't have save button, completely breaks my workflow that it saves everything all the time. Sure I can make a copy, but how to I replace the original document afterward? Finally, person preference, I don't like browser based apps. I get lost if I have more than two browser windows and five tabs open, why would I want yet another thing running in the browser then?
  • mumblemumble 3y ago
    The companies I work at are all using either Google Docs or Office 365. The collaboration benefits are pretty immense, and can save people a lot of synchronization and communication effort. Most my colleagues see oldschool desktop document editing software as obsolete and frustrating to work with.
    • ajross 3y ago
      Yeah. Cloud office tooling has won, at this point. There will always be a handful of (mostly spreadsheet) users who insist on doing things locally, but at this stage that is emphatically a small minority. And of that market, LibreOffice has captured essentially none of it.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        If you're collaborating with other people (with some narrow exceptions), the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying. And, to your point, LibreOffice is from an era when providing a plausible alternative to Microsoft desktop products was a big deal. It really isn't at this point. Mainstream users use cloud-based options and specific power users use Microsoft Office.
        • eastbound 3y ago
          > the idea of sending around point-in-time snapshots of documents feels horrifying The idea that Google has every startup’s term sheet, plans, budgets, is really strange to me. USA can so easily spy on every other country’s data. Am I the last dinosaur? Are all the other concerns dead?
          • lstodd 3y ago
            No, you are not. This is truely strange. I can understand giving away grocery lists to the world, but not this.
          • jahewson 3y ago
            I mean, at Google scale the investors in global capital all know each other and invest in each other’s funds anyway.
  • pengaru 3y ago
    What's more important for RH's paying customers? Apparently their movie industry contracts are the ones keeping the lights on for the desktop group...
  • joao_lopes 3y ago
    That's a false comparison. You can still edit documents using LibreOffice installed via flatpak, or, like probably most users, use Google Docs, Office 365, or OnlyOffice. Meanwhile without proper HDR support and better color management, Linux desktop is basically a non-starter for any professional creative use-case, including design, animation, illustration, image and video editing. Ideally both would be done but they seem to have limited resources, so in this scenario I personally fully support their choice as it will enable Linux desktop usage to a whole new user-base (which is also a paying user-base, namely animation studios that use RHEL).
    • dmix 3y ago
      If they have real studios using it I'm guessing this just means plug and play HDR support? As opposed some previously working set up requiring tweaking it yourself?
      • jdiff 3y ago
        No, HDR basically doesn't exist on Linux at this stage. I believe there's some (insufficient) scaffolding in the kernel for it, but no support in the common display stacks.
      • COGlory 3y ago
        To my knowledge, there was no working HDR of any kind until the last year, when Valve hacked in hardware-specific HDR into Gamescope, and even that only works if you really get your hands dirty. Last month there was a hackathon with all the big players (Valve, AMD, Nvidia, KDE, Red Hat, Wayland) to finally settle on a plan for universal compositor HDR implementation.
  • somenewaccount1 3y ago
    In 2023? I would argue image/video editing for sure.
  • pnpnp 3y ago
    My vote would be replacing the dumpster fire that X currently is. Everyone would benefit from that.
  • GlacierFox 3y ago
    Image and video editing. The vast majority of VFX shops run on RHEL/ Alma. I expect the microscopic fraction of users who use desktop Linux, then the even more microscopic fraction of users who use Linux for Libre Office is just not worth supporting over other more important things. Besides, I think you can just install Libre Office using Flatpak.
  • jahewson 3y ago
    Gamers want HDR too.
  • trop 3y ago
    Of course one could argue that the hardcore Linux (er, GNU/Linux) document creator will use Emacs with AUCTeX (or canny uses of org-mode), with rendering via XeTeX/LaTeX/LuaTeX... Or markdown piped through pandoc, for those who want to take it easy. LibreOffice, it's a slippery slope... Next thing we'll be using the mouse and ditching the tiled window manager.
  • raverbashing 3y ago
    Wayland/HDR etc is much more important for those who need it than using LibreOffice (which still will be available) when there are plenty of online solutions that work fine
    • pmoriarty 3y ago
      They work fine if you don't give a shit about your privacy.
      • pnpnp 3y ago
        X is horrible from a security perspective. It has heaps of baggage from back before that was a concern. Maybe Wayland isn’t it, but a replacement would definitely benefit everyone.
• einpoklum 3y ago
  How does this make one drop LibreOffice as a package? If I focus on video editing, do I drop... say, Thunderbird, because of "adjusting my engineering priorities"? What are users of my distribution supposed to use, by default? This sounds weird, if not disingenuous.