ancient LibreOffice

[Liam Proven]

On 11 October 2013 18:52, Udvarias Ur <udvarias1 at gmail.com> wrote:

Please can you stick to using plain, unformatted ASCII text on the
list? I don't know what formatting you are using but your last message
appeared to me as a hard-to-read thin spidery font something like
Courier.


> On 13-10-11 01:47 AM, Jared Norris wrote:
>
> From your signature it appears you're using a version of Ubuntu that is
> nearly 18 months old so I'm not sure what the issue is with having
> applications that are of about that age.
>
> Thanks for all the info everyone.
>
> I now understand why my LO is not being upgraded to the latest version. The
> release dates are…
>
> LO  3.5  12/02
> U  12.04 12/04
> LO  3.6  12/08
> U  12.10 12/10
>
> So, as a former Quality Assurance Engineer, I don't understand why Canonical
> is patching LO 3.5 rather than upgrading to LO 3.6. It was, after all,
> released before U 12.10.

Canonical isn't patching LibreOffice. The LibreOffice project is
patching LibreOffice. Canonical is merely carrying the updates.

As a former software pro, are you not aware of the difference between
stable versions, minor releases and major releases? I find that hard
to believe.

The versions you get in the LTS are minor releases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_release

> As for the reason I'm still on 12.04. Canonical decided to drop support for
> Unity 2D and Gnome for Gnome Classic.

Note that the GNOME Project killed GNOME Fallback Mode, which I think
is what you are referring to. GNOME Classic is something different,
which replaces the GNOME Shell with a Windows-95-style taskbar and
start menu, but drawn using GNOME 3 OpenGl-accelerated compositing.

You are blaming Canonical for things that other companies, external to
them, are doing. This is unfair and unjust, and it betrays your
inadequate understanding of where the component parts of Ubuntu come
from. You need to do a bit more Googling and reading and learning, I'm
afraid. To complain from a position of ignorance reflects badly upon
you.

> As far as I've been able to determine
> neither thought of providing a list of 3D graphics cards and a procedure to
> upgrade the hardware for those of us who had 2D graphics cards in our
> computers. Ergo, I've stayed on 12.04.

OK, well, I am in a vaguely similar position on one of my machines, a
2008 Toshiba laptop whose GPU is no longer supported by Ubuntu after
12.04-1. Even 12.04-2 and subsequent releases break it, meaning that
Unity is no longer usable.

I switched to Xubuntu instead. The proprietary AMD Catalyst driver no
longer supports my RV620 GPU and the Free AMD driver does not do
sufficient OpenGL acceleration for Unity to work, but XFCE works with
it just fine.

I am considering switching from Xubuntu (XFCE) to Lubuntu (LXDE) as
this is what I am using on my oldest laptop - a 2004 machine - and it
works very well. LXDE is less customisable than XFCE (but more
customisable than Unity!), but it is also smaller, simpler and faster
and it does everything I need.

If you like the GNOME Fallback Mode environment with a Win95-style
taskbar and start menu, then you will find that both XFCE and LXDE
support this very well, and both are considerably smaller and faster
than any GNOME 2 (Maté) or GNOME 3 (GNOME Classic, Cinnamon) based
environment.

> P.S. Both Firefox and Thunderbird are included in Ubuntu releases and yet
> they are, ultimately, upgraded to the most recent versions.

They do not have "stable" and "unstable" versions in the same way as
LibreOffice.

Firefox has an Extended Support Release version but it is very old and
does not have all the features, as new Firefox major releases come
along every 6 weeks or so. LibreOffice major releases are much less
frequent -- approximately annual.

Firefox ESR is currently on v17. The current release is v24. That is a
big difference. Canonical decided that sticking with the ESR releases
would be too limiting. It did at first, but people complained and were
installing newer releases by hand and breaking things. (I know, I was
one of them!)

And this is why Canonical doesn't do major-releases upgrades of
LibreOffice - because they are major releases, meaning significant
changes, meaning that considerably more testing and integration work
is needed.

If you want the latest components, do not run the LTS release of
Ubuntu. If that means that you don't have the graphic support that you
need (like me), then switch from Ubuntu and Unity/GNOME 3 to a remix
that has a 2D desktop (like me), and run Xubuntu or Lubuntu.

KDE can also run in a 2D-only mode, but I personally do not like it or
recommend it. In tests, it is actually bigger and slower than *both*
Unity and GNOME 3:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/04/26/xbuntu_round_up/

>From that article:

<<
To compare resource usage, I installed all of them in a VirtualBox VM
with the default 8GB of disk and 1GB of RAM. Here's how they fared:

Name | RAM used (MB) | Disk used (GB)
Lubuntu | 119 | 2
Xubuntu | 165 | 2.5
Ubuntu | 229 | 2.8
Ubuntu GNOME | 236 | 3.1
Kubuntu | 256 | 3.3

Both Ubuntu GNOME and Kubuntu share the dubious distinction of using
more memory and disk space than the parent operating system from which
they're derived. Xubuntu is slightly lighter-weight than the Real
Thing, but if you want something small and fast, the clear winner is
Lubuntu.

>>

Source: my own testing.

Thunderbird used to be based off the Firefox ESR but they just
recently dropped that. From now on it will update with Firefox.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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