Why Linux and LibreOffice suck!

Having written articles on small issues such as politics and religion, I now feel ready to once again stick my boot into a much larger topic. Why Linux is a steaming pile of Cow Turd! First, I will explain, the article you should have been reading at this very moment is about those who aim to disrupt the Olympics, but thanks to Linux and the LibreOffice suite, you get this instead.

It started with me writing an article on my fully updated Ubuntu 11.04 powered netbook, having written most of the article the previous evening I decided to finish it on the train to work. Obviously having worked with computers for many years, I make regular saves of my work just in case the worst should happen… Which it did. Having made a save prior to typing a bit more, the computer totally locks up, forcing me to perform a hard shutdown and a minor bit of cursing.

When I get into the office, I restart the computer to find nothing but a zero-byte file where my 750 word article once was. A quick search of Google revealed why. Apparently when you save a file in LibreOffice it doesn’t call fsync to force the file to be written to the disk, and because of the delayed allocation in modern file systems, there exists a delay between hitting the save button and the file actually getting written to the disk. The crash happened before the file was written and the result is a zero-byte file. After discovering this, my minor cursing turned to thoughts of what I would like to do with some of the LibreOffice developers and an industrial woodchipper!

A little more investigation reveals that the problem was first reported in July 2011, and has only just been fixed, however the fixed version is not yet available. Thing is, I am not alone, a friend of mine lost several terabytes of media due to a Linux file system fault. As a result of this, I have now lost all confidence in Linux, and my only use of it will be to consume content, rather than to create it. Simply put, when it comes to the crunch, Windows is always there for me. Windows never just crashes on me. Windows never loses all my work due to lazy development. Windows doesn’t take nine months to release a critical bugfix.

Linux advocates would have schools use Linux and LibreOffice in order to avoid the evil Microsoft and their licensing fees. I hope that comes with a warning to the teachers that the students can lose all their work without notice and it’s not even their fault. The truth of the matter is that Linux and the applications which run on it are not ready for the mass market. There is a reason Windows is still the dominant operating system, it just works and it’s simple. Linux is a poor substitute, it is much harder to use and lacks the quality look and feel of Windows. Oh, and for you Apple fans, I don’t count your shiny joke of an OS, I mean, anybody who is stupid enough to pay full price for one of your systems will then purchase Microsoft Office to do any serious work.

Anyway, enough of a rant, written in Word, on my Windows PC. As always, please feel free to comment.

Share

8 Comments

  1. Jean

    I feel exactly the same way. Whenever you need help on a Liux topic, the answer will be some gibberish like: “open terminal, type foo -%&?BS -foo /foo/totalBS”. Even if there is a perfectly neat GUI tool for your problem. Which is better, because you will have a remote idea of what you are actually doing. And well, Libreoffice sucks. It works great, if you work with people who use it too, but there is simply no interoperability with MSOffice whatsoever which renders it useless most of the time.

    Reply
  2. Jebril

    With you on this, while Libre Office’s writer has generally worked more or less for me and done it’s job. There is a huge bug in the Power Point version that pretty much makes it useless. Saving any kind of a power point as a pptx (you know the industry standard) will destroy your slideshow removing half the pictures, destroying font and format. They may have fixed it in the new version but why was this even released. I am all for supporting Linux but this is really ridiculous. Despite all the way Linux has come it still has a long, LONG way to come.

    Despite all that Linux is still better than Windows and definitely Mac in a ton of things, just creation of content as you pointed has never been a strong point…or a point at all for that matter.

    Reply
  3. maxwell

    Well, you are only now discovering that Loonix is just a toy operating system? The problem is that these leftwing nutcases actually fantasize their ‘operating system from hell’ being on more desktops than a perfectly good working system like MS Windows.

    The market has clearly chosen – over and over and over again. The only way ‘Loonix’ ‘succeeds’ is in lock-step leftwing anti-business ‘universities’ where it is crammed down your throat.

    If Loonix actually took over the desktop market (it could not possibly happen in any kind of actual competition), computing would simply not be available to the vast majority of folks who use computers today.

    And they do NOT use Loonix.

    Reply
  4. Michael

    I use LibreOffice for my work as a technical writer. It is a pile of trash, crashes about 3 times a day. But I am too cheap to get a license in Word, and my work is all in Libreoffice. So I will keep plugging through until my contract ends.

    Reply
  5. John Krawczyk

    Libre writer sucks because after you do a save and quit; when you go to open your saved document it says “document corrupt” or something similat. Thus all your work is lost. I think this is the one unforgiveable sin in software: where it says your work is saved but it isn’t.

    Apparently the authors of Libre writer don’t agree with me.

    Reply
  6. John Il

    If something is free and is very good people will come. If its free and does not come close to a paid version people won’t come. Open source is a very stable but flat lined community of projects that don’t appeal to the masses and have never really impressed mainstream users. Some have accepted the move to open source, but not without compromises which some do admit and others clarify as changes not compromises. The open source projects that did become more mainstream were helped by big corporations who made them more proprietary then open source. Chromium (Chrome) Chrome OS, Android, Firefox, WebKit (Safari). Even a OS like Ubuntu benefits from Canonicle promoting it through more business channels and paid support. In the end the licensed software still runs on the majority of devices out there in one form or another.

    Reply
  7. Highlander

    Depending on the version of Linux you’re using, it can either be garbage, or absolutely fine. My heavily customised version of Ubuntu/LXDE works fine for me.

    LibreOffice is still a pile of garbage, that looks like 1990s abandonware that never got past alpha release. It does not even save the document as it was saved. Try opening a saved document, only to find that it is a completely different format. And then try to find ‘Page Setup’ in the completely unintuitive and illogical menu. Whoever wrote this programme couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.

    I use WPS Office, which does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

    Reply
  8. The Combo Man

    It makes me giggle to read these kinds of comment pages. As I read through every single post, it was clear that each one was completely fake. You know what, I use Windows. I use Linux. They both do their respective tasks, and I’m not going to claim that either one is better than the other. The only thing that I can claim is this: My very simple uncustomized install of Linux works fine and has year after year, just like my very simple uncustomized install of Windows has as well. If you want to condemn hoards of projects with comments about one or two programmers faults for not updating or fixing something then I have two recommendations for you: (1) Scream at the gasoline pump handle when you’re filling up your car, because that’s clearly the reason your car is garbage, and (2) Sign up and work on one of those projects you’re complaining about, because until you do that, you have no idea at all what you’re talking about one either side of the fence.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *