1 Jul
2018
1 Jul
'18
12:40 a.m.
As other people may read this thread I think it is important to add an
opposing viewpoint.
Unless you are willing to do what Tim and friends did for KDE by taking
on and actively maintaining the project, I cannot recommend OpenOffice
to anyone. Even OpenOffice's own few remaining developers have at times
recommended against using it. Those who do use it are recommended to
install workarounds themselves as OpenOffice does not have the resources
to produce fixes for known security problems until many months after
they are reported. For example, 4.1.3 had a known security problem for
ten months but did not have the resources to get a fix out.
If you must use OpenOffice do not download from third party sites as
there are lots of infected OpenOffice downloads out there. But even
after downloading OpenOffice from the master site your work is not done.
You have to follow the project and install workarounds yourself for
security holes that OpenOffice knows about when they can't get the
releases out to fix them.
Unlike KDE 4 versus KDE 3 (or systemd versus sysvinit) LibreOffice is
a good and compatible replacement for OpenOffice. Indeed, none of our
users reported any problems or complaints when we switched from
OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Thus there is little reason to maintain
OpenOffice and I do not foresee a long future for it.
I also recommend installing LibreOffice from your distro rather than
from LibreOffice upstream unless you need bleeding edge functionality.
--Mike