On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 14:50 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 13:44:53 Jim via tde-users wrote:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 13:08 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 12:41:22 Jim wrote:
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
This (above) is an interesting idea, and I may give it a try, but for now, my OO works just fine.
It's a good suggestion, if it works. I haven't tested it yet, but I might try it with OO.
I have no idea whether it will work with OO (I don't have OO on my system). It depends on whether OO uses the gnome GUI toolkit or now.
However, if I start OO from command-line, then I get a plain white vanilla Gnomish interface, not my TDE colors.
That's interesting. You might use ps -E to see whether there are any interesting command-line options or environment variables that are set when you run it from (presumably) some TDE menu.
In any case, this is a hack; and if it works, yes, it's a really good hack. I will try it sometime. But ordinary users ought not to be expected to have to hack their programs just to make things work.
You should find the people who decided that all screens are 96 DPI, even when they aren't. In my opinion that was the real hack (to make up for people who stupidly assumed all computer screens would always be 96 DPI), and setting GDK_DPI_SCALE is a counter-measure against that brain-damaged decision.
My TDE color scheme can be found on the screenshots page. <And for my programs (both TDE and non-TDE), as well as for my settings on machines, devices, etc., I use a lighter font (usually yellow/gold/orange or green) on a dark background, as it is most visible for myself. Again, screenshots can be found on the TDE page.
As for the actual interface that I use for writing, I don't touch the menus; or, I ought to say, I haven't touched the menus since I started using OpenOffice back in the early 2000s sometime. Ever since, I have just copied over my settings, and it has worked, and still works in OO. When I changed to LO, everything got messed up. I did try, for a long time, to modify LO settings to work for me, but it was always just more of the same crap.
Well, since I don't use either, I can't help you. But I'm willing to bet someone out there might be able to help you get things more to your liking.
Once I got the new fork of OpenOffice to work (which also took some finagling), all my old settings also worked, by which I mean, the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s. And they still work now, with OpenOffice, but not with LibreOffice.
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth. And I am not talking about startup, etc., but about ordinary use, after it has already been started. But let me give an example:
Dare I ask what CPU and how much RAM you have?
I am working on a different screen; let's say that it is graphics in gimp, or that I am working with a plain text file, and now want to copy that content in my office program. When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible. I am looking at a blank screen. I can switch back and forth between the screens, but the LO screen is just blank, and I must wait for it to catch up. By the time it actually appears, I have often completely forgotten whatever it was that I was going to insert / revise / whatever. Even then, after it appears, I often still could not actually use it, but just had to look at a frozen screen.
It sounds to me like you are desperately out of memory and that you are furiously paging. I also wonder whether you have an SSD (on SATA), a NVM disk, or a good old spinning platters disk.
This is what I mean by LibreOffice being "useless"; and since OpenOffice accepts my settings -- the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s, and I don't have to wait for any lag, because I don't have some background processes that are hogging resources -- I use OpenOffice, and recommend it to anybody else who has similar problems.
As I mentioned before, I do think LO is slow. But my experience is nothing like yours.
Again, if you want to say that it is all due to my settings, then you will have to do more to convince me; because my settings work just fine for me, and OpenOffice, while not perfect, allows me to get some actual work done.
When I was talking about your settings, I was referring to your GDK_DPI_SCALE and font/background colour choices, not about whatever other settings you have. Not using either LO or OO, I don't know what settings you have that could be making LO slow (assuming that there are such settings).
No, I mean that (as I understand it) many people (I even know a few myself) successfully use LO to create, edit and read documents.
So I don't quite understand how you can say it isn't a "you" problem when other people are able to use it, but you say you can't get anything done with it.
It may be in the same way that other people prefer convenience over simplicity. Myself, I keep things as simple as I can, not only on my machines, but also in my own life in general. However, this simplicity often takes a lot of effort.
That almost sounds self-contradictory. :-)
I get into the same kind of discussions with other people about using apps on my phone. Everybody keeps telling me how convenient it will be for me to use their app; except that I use my phone pretty much just as a phone. Inconvenient in the short term, perhaps; but overall, I keep my life much less complicated by avoiding all those convenient solutions.
This may be a bad analogy, but I suspect that we might be having a similar kind of disagreement.
I don't think so. I also don't bother with many phone apps; but I do have some which make my life more convenient. If an app can make my life less complicated by doing something for me, then I can compare the "cost" of learning and using the app to the "cost" of not using it.
Even with what you have said... you talked about having a bunch of "settings" (whatever specifically you are talking about). Presumably it took time and effort to figure those out and set things up how you like. And now (quite reasonably) you want some return on investment. And I think lots of things are like that... you can do without, or you can spend the time to acquire the knowledge about something and then hopefully make up the learning curve time with increased productivity.
Are you talking about the document? I have black text on white background. I guess some people don't like that much contrast.
No, lighter text on dark background. I have no problem at all getting that part right. It looks the same in both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I mean the interface, menus, etc., are not visible.
I assume that when you say "are not visible" you mean "you can't see them well because they aren't in colours you find easy to see", as opposed to "they are actually not visible". (Or maybe "they are in a font size that is hard to see".)
I should have said it is nowhere near as slow for me as for you. Maybe your system has (way) too much going on for the amount of RAM you have and/or the CPU you have.
I always have shells open that are running top and htop, and I keep a pretty close eye on resources, CPU usage, etc. It is rare that my system misbehaves.
So what is your system doing when LO is taking 5 minutes to show up? It's not clear to me (might be wrong about this) that it's easy to see swapping/paging behaviour with either of those tools (even though when I run I see memory and swap availability, but that is different about whether swap is busily being read from).
For me, it takes about 3 seconds to start up. I think that is slow, but it isn't minutes.
When I say LibreOffice is slow, I don't mean startup. I mean, actual usage, in the moment.
The biggest .doc I have is 57 pages, a bit over 7 MB (including some photos, but mainly text). It seems quite quick to me.
I have a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a Ryzen 4700U 8-core CPU. It is getting on 5 years old, but not counting gaming laptops, it was a pretty fast laptop at the time.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included images than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Yes, I have heard that about OO, and it is a concern of mine. I hear that maybe it's not as secure, etc., etc. But it doesn't concern me much, as I don't do anything with my office program that requires an internet connection.
I have no idea about its security issues, and whether any security issues have anything to do with being on-line. (A long time ago some people I know got a "redacted" M$word doc from someone, but inside the doc was the redacted info, it was "conveniently" saved in the document file in case the user wanted to "undo" the redactions. That was a horrible security issue which had nothing to do with any network connections.)
And I don't need it so much for images, just for text. When I do need to insert an image, I usually wait until later, create a marker for where I want to insert it, and then I anchor it to a specific part of the page, to make sure it doesn't move around after changes or restarts.
As I said, OO is the lesser of two evils. I can either use LO, which everybody says is better, but which brings my machine to a halt; or I can use OO, which is supposed to be insecure, but at least it works, and doesn't freeze my machine, and after using it for over 20 years, I have yet to experience any bad effects.
While I have various kinds of texts that I might be working on, and so different problems, there is one long-term project that has taken up most of my adult life; since about 1983 or so. The texts for that project were started in manuscript and typewriter, and have gone through (let me count ...), I believe, 6 or 7 different word processing programs since then.
I started using TeX in 1983. And my original TeX files are still 100% compatible with the TeX of 1983. This "archival" nature is one of the reasons I continue to use TeX (and have started using ConTeXt).
No, I mean that you can change the font size and you can change the colour of the background and various other things to suit yourself, which will make things less frustrating for you. If you refuse to do so, that is not a valid criticism of LO (or any other program).
I can change all those things; it's the interface itself (surrounding the text part, the borders, menus, etc., and therein, the size and color of fonts).
I'm surprised you can change the font size, somewhat surprised you can't change the colour of the font, but not entirely surprised you can't change some of the other things you mention. These things don't bother me, but I know some people want all these things to be consistent.
And the woolly mammoths roamed the earth.
I used to live by hunting woolly mammoths. I still have my old spears and atlatl (spear-thrower). I also like stone tools.
Yeah, you can leave your stone tools outside and they don't rust.
Anyway ... I think we have gone far enough off-topic on this matter, and nothing will get resolved by going round and round.
Probably. Since I don't use LO or OO, I largely don't care to tweak anything. I guess the only thing left to do is for you to try some of these things if you feel so motivated. And if you just keep happily using OO, then you will be happy there.
As to the original question ... my answer was to Uwe or anybody else out there who is frustrated with LibreOffice.
Give OpenOffice a try. It works for me.
Or maybe they want to try TeXworks or something like that. ;-)
Jim