Evaluating my experience with OpenOffice and LibreOffice @ Maverick.

[Bas Roufs]

Hello Everybody

Ever since the upgrade to Kubuntu Maverick, I have been experiencing
weird problems with the OpenOffice coming with it. Often, the system
stagnated suddenly, in the middle of some working session. Along with
Kubuntu 8.10 until and including 10.04, I had such crashes not more
than a few times per month - in about 99% of the cases, I managed to
"restore" the document without problems. But ever since the upgrade to
Maverick, I have been experiencing such problems several times per
week. About 5% of the crashed documents are simply not recoverable any
more - as a matter of consequence, I make now many more back-up copy
files than before.  When monitoring the system activity during OO
sessions, the package "Krunner" used 1% up to 30% of the CPU -
sometimes even more. Also other packages tend to use sometimes to use
similar percentages of the CPU: eg. "soffice.bin".

That's why I have installed today the new "stable" LibreOffice 3.3.0
via a ppa repository. For adding this specific repository, I have
followed the instructions at a newly published page at ubuntugeek.com:
see http://bit.ly/hGBMZB . For a custom installation of the
LibreOffice packages I need, I have used Synaptic - e.g. the various
language tools are more easily discoverable via that package manager.
By installing the package "libreoffice-kde" I have integrated
LibreOffice in the existing KDE environment.

By installing LibreOffice in the way summarised above, I did indeed
remove OpenOffice. I prefer to do so for the sake of maintaining
system stability.

So far, everything seems to work properly in combination with
LibreOffice. Later this week, I will share a bit more practice
practice experience at this forum.

Respectfully yours,

Bas.