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Comment by brusch64 | Hacker News Reader

I really wonder if LibreOffice is not totally adequate for the users in the city of Munich.

I know that it has its problems if you want to use it with Word generated documents, and it obviously has problems with add-ons developed for Word.

But I could really think that it works quite nice, if all your documents are generated for LibreOffice.

I am using Open / LibreOffice since nearly 10 years exclusively at home and I don't have any problems using it - but my needs are VERY modest. Basically I am using it as an WYSIWYG typewriter.

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I use LibreOffice in an environment where almost every other user uses Microsoft Office tools. I've had difficulty with some documents in the docx format. Most of the documents will turn out to be ok but when certain types of formatting are included problems start to appear.

Most of the problems come from, I think, unnecessary features. For example a footer for the author's name on each page.

Really? A footer with a value from variable is "unnecessary" feature?

In this case, yes. It was definitely unnecessary to remind me of the author's name on each page.

the only problem that I can think of is that of exchanging word documents over the "city lines".

I think this is really sad. As someone who went through university when the last wave of centralized unix died off, then the move to decentralized windows, and to decentralized linux (because they couldn't really figure it out mostly).

I found that move to decentralization and the availability of compilers and tools and dev. environments and easy ways to get admin privileges, well I credit that with my learning how to code/admin/... and to my succes later in life. These computers, I've heard from a friend, are LOCKED down. As in, try to compile anything against a GUI library is a complete non-starter. Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible.

Add to that that even the development environments that do exist on linux are ... well sorry to say but let's be honest here ... far inferior for learning to code and to writing simple games than the ones available on windows.

Nobody's going to learn how to use computers, how to program and how to improve their situation on these linux machines. And that sucks.

But hey, easier on the admins !

(not that it's anywhere near as bad as SAAS though)

FUD. Try to get anything done in a Windows group policy environment. Same problem, different OS. The serious IDEs are (mostly) available on all platforms, except for Visual Studio (naturally). The machine is installed to be used by a regular user, why would you want it to be developer-friendly? Regular civil servants need to compile applications?

Creating a simple game on a Linux machine:

    nano awesomewebglgame.html

Compiling anything under linux without root is almost impossible

This is bizarre, and very much not true. If you have a C compiler and sufficient disk space you can build whatever you want in your home directory. It might take a while, but most things that use autoconf will accept `--prefix=/home/user/stuff/` and target that location.

Not having a C compiler is rare as it tends to be deep in the requirements chain of other packages. For other languages, I believe Python is mandatory on Redhat and Perl on Debian, if you don't mind old versions.

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