Its the little things, or why I hate LibreOffice Writer

[BarkingGhostar]

Over the past four or five years I've been pushing myself to spend more and more time in a Linux environment. One of my therapy activities in life is to write short stories. I do this almost every day. I always include one or more pictures that I want to represent as full-page and when they are in landscape aspect this becomes a true royal pain in the butt to do in LibreOffice Writer.

Now, in Windows Office 2007 Word this is as simple as a one button click and that one page changes orientation. There is not even anything close to this ease of operation in LibreOffice Writer and you have to just through hoops that are the nine rings of hell, offer your first born as sacrifice, etc. before you can get something as silly as one page only being of a different orientation in a effing document.

BTW, I always save my Witer documents as Microsoft Word *.docx, which is Microsoft's XML markup format. I want to be sure they open correctly in Word but even then I'm betting if I go looking it will be pure hellacious destruction.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

PS I really need to just get Microsoft Word/Office setup and running under Wine.

 

[JJChicken]

Is there a web app for MS word you could use?

 

[ultimatebob]

Is there a web app for MS word you could use?

Yeah, you can just use Office Online if that's your thing now. Or, Google Docs if you're against paying Microsoft for anything.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I'm against anything cloud-based.

 

[JJChicken]

I'm against anything cloud-based.

Whats the rationale for that?

 

[lxskllr]

My rationale is you don't fully control it. You could lose your files, software, everything. Maybe they make changes you don't like. You can't use an old version. It's on take it or leave it terms. That doesn't even get into situations where an ad company like google can poke through your files to learn more about you. It takes all the power away from the user and gives it to a third party.

 

[JJChicken]

My rationale is you don't fully control it. You could lose your files, software, everything. Maybe they make changes you don't like. You can't use an old version. It's on take it or leave it terms. That doesn't even get into situations where an ad company like google can poke through your files to learn more about you. It takes all the power away from the user and gives it to a third party.

Yes thats very true. And you get stuck on a subscription model like Microsoft Office or Adobe (I really hate Microsoft for doing that - we’ve all spent so much money on office in the past and now I have to pay 99$ a year for it?!).

However in principle there is a lot of benefit to cloud based solutions also. You don’t need to have a super fast machine, just log into a server. From a developer’s perspective, cloud based lets you reach out to many more users across different platforms (I am boxed in since I do most of my dev work on Swift and XCode).

I recently got a Google Cloud Engine service and I am totally loving having my own linux server in the cloud that I log into from my mac.

So I think a medium can exist, esp for open source, where you access via cloud and also have control over your files and you have the underlying source code of the program so you can rebuild locally.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

When my wife installed Office 365 from her workplace onto her at-home work PC it said that it needed to be able to access the Internet once every 30 days. But the moment I happen to reboot my gateway (I do this about every 45-60 days) it complained. Also, nothing is needed in the Cloud that can't be already done locally. And why would I go the leach-ware route when Office 2019 is currently available if I had to go that route?

BTW, I'm in big telecom with its own for of cloud services and even my employer has lost complete faith in it.