OpenOffice/Gnome file dialogs

[Edward H. Trager]

Hi, Eric,

On Thursday 2005.09.29 22:15:30 +0200, Eric Feliksik wrote:
> Breezy is great, but I still have a big annoyance about OpenOffice 
> (well, actually many, but let's be realistic and within the scope of 
> Ubuntu for the moment):
> 
> The file open/save dialogs are still the ugly old openoffice ones! I 
> know the openoffice.org2-gnome packages intends to fix this, and it can 
> be enabled in OpenOffice-preferences/OpenOffice.org/General. However, 
> it's not enabled by default. I heard in Hoary the reason for this was 
> because of stability issues with the openoffice-gnome package.

Well, maybe they are ugly but the product is stable, which is much more
important.  Novell/SuSE have previously created customized versions of OpenOffice for
the SuSE Linux distributions which I have used extensively : 
I have had sufficiently bad experiences with custom versions of OpenOffice
--specifically, stability issues-- that now I always just go to OpenOffice.org
and download a stock version.  The customized versions drive me nuts.

Ubuntu should continue to concentrate on the more important things for now.
Since the stock OpenOffice is not broken, don't try to "fix" it --or "break"
it, depending on your perspective! -- by plastering on some desktop-specific
dialog boxes (and I don't care whether we are talking about GTK, KDE, or
Quartz dialog boxes).

In another posting, a list member mentioned the fact that his Windows buddy could
not figure out how to install additional fonts on Ubuntu.  I also could not
figure out the GUI way to do it on Ubuntu.  So of course I resorted to the non-GUI way
which is easy for me (i.e., as root drop fonts into /usr/share/fonts).  But
even as I was solving the problem for myself, I was thinking, gee this *really*
is *not* the right answer for inexperienced users!  

In KDE, GUI-based system-wide or user-specific font installation is as easy
as in Windows or Mac.  But in Ubuntu (and presumably other distributions that
have chosen Gnome as the primary desktop), the Gnome documentation itself tells the
user to place fonts in /usr/share/fonts and does not even mention a GUI way
to do it.  Is there a GUI way to do it, or is the Gnome desktop still really
that immature?  This is a bit of a rhetorical question -- I am the type of experienced
user who doesn't have a lot of time to waste.  If I can't figure out the GUI way to
do it within five minutes, then I don't care and I'll do it the command-line way.
But I am sure that people just trying out Linux must think this kind of obstacle is
maddening.

In conclusion: providing users an easy, intuitive GUI-based way to install user-only or
system-wide fonts is a good example of a large class of easy-to-solve problems that
Ubuntu should work on solving first.  "Fixing" OpenOffice to make it look more
integrated belongs to a separate class of potentially thornier problems that can wait 
until after the basic problems of creating a Linux "for human beings"
have been solved.

-- Ed Trager

> 
> Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
> 
> Eric
> 
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