I hope this is somewhat correct but my understanding of the situation is this (Kinda in
bullet form)
-Back in 2010 Oracle bought Sun and its assets including OOffice
-During the acquisition Oracle pulled back a lot of the internal devs, without any
explanation or roadmap for OOffice. This caused the majority of outside devs to leave and
fork, as the future of the project was up in the air.
-Not too long after, all active development of OOffice stopped on Oracles side (I think at
this time the other office suite they worked on was "killed" too). This was
because a majority of work was not being done on the LibreOffice fork
The main reason I see the two communities at odds, is that OpenOffice still brands
themselves as the "go to office suite" with the brand power they created over a
decade ago, but with no true active development. LibreOffice members have reached out to
OpenOffice a few times to put something like "This is the legacy version, for an up
to date more compatible office suite check out LibreOffice" on the page, but with
only crickets as a response. For the past while, OpenOffice releases new
"updates" with backported security patches, and some rather comical commits like
"Added space to this comment", "shifted this line of code up a line",
or "fixed a typo in this comment" (almost just making commits just to make
commits). Most things they do is to make the project not look actually dead LOL
It kinda boils down to... if you ask someone what the office suite to use is. They might
very well suggest OOffice because for a long time it was the BEST, but for alot of new
users what they probably want is LibreOffice.
On the flip side... as a TDE user I hear "Why not use plasma?" all the damn
time, and my reasons are the same as yours for OOffice. It does what I want... start apps,
play games on steam, and eyes in my kicker panel. (I started on Gnome 2 and KDE 3.5, if
you took a screenshot now, its pretty much the same as back then, eyes and goldfish toys
and everything lol)
Lowkey, I have used plasma on and off, but I always come back to trinity, they only thing
I liled about plasma better was how it handled Display Scaling