It’s Not The Hokey Cokey; OpenOffice BACK In Ubuntu Netbook Edition After User Outcry

By , Published February 11, 2010

The community outcry over the removal of OpenOffice from Ubuntu Netbook Edition has seen developers reaching for a rethink over the controversial decision.

The first reversal earlier this week that saw AbiWord and GNUMeric step in as replacements. Now the decision has been fully reversed: OpenOffice WILL be installed by default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Rick Spencer, the dev responsible for the decision, posted the following statement on the Ubuntu Netbook app selection whiteboard: -

All in all it seems that users and community members would really prefer that we ship OOo for the editing suite.

We discussed a bit in #ubuntu-desktop this morning and decided that we should probably switch back to OOo, which we will do on Monday if we don’t hear anything that makes us change our minds again.

Phew!

Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

Related posts:

  1. AbiWord & Gnumeric To Replace OpenOffice in Ubuntu Netbook Edition
  2. OpenOffice Dropped From Ubuntu Netbook Edition
  3. OpenOffice 3.2 Coming November €“ What's New
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  • Anonymous

    It personally doesn’t affect me, but I think that by having dropped OpenOffice Ubuntu netbook would have taken a stepback, as many people use the suite of office applications. Well done that they’ve listened to peoples reactions over this.

  • Anonymous

    It personally doesn’t affect me, but I think that by having dropped OpenOffice Ubuntu netbook would have taken a stepback, as many people use the suite of office applications. Well done that they’ve listened to peoples reactions over this.

  • http://twitter.com/jbl0ndie Jonathon Hodges

    Yes but it’s not like Apple saying, we’re not going to bundle iMovie with OSX, it’s more like saying we’re not going to bundle iTunes with OSX and then everyone says, “Ok, whatever, I’ll just go and download it”.

    The beauty of Ubuntu is that it’s so amazingly easy to get great software as you need it. I’m short of space on my little Eee PC so sometimes I’ll install an application, use it, uninstall it until next time I need it.

    Anyway, it almost doesn’t deserve to be in UNE until someone can hack it to work with small screen devices like netbooks. If someone were able to reduce the height of all the menus and status bars, we’d get a lot more space for workspace on screen of a netbook.

    jblondie

    • Anonymous

      I ‘hack’ it to work on my netbook. I’m not sure about everyone else, but I feel like the majority of the toolbars in OOo contain a lot of stuff I never need, and even more stuff that I rarely need. If i need one of those, I’ll go search the menus anyway, since the pictures don’t always describe what I need well. I normally am able to get a fair amount of vertical real estate back just by cleaning up the toolbars to suit my needs. I feel like they should clean them a lot by default, but I can see why they wouldn’t want to get rid of stuff now that people are used to it being there.

    • Anonymous

      I ‘hack’ it to work on my netbook. I’m not sure about everyone else, but I feel like the majority of the toolbars in OOo contain a lot of stuff I never need, and even more stuff that I rarely need. If i need one of those, I’ll go search the menus anyway, since the pictures don’t always describe what I need well. I normally am able to get a fair amount of vertical real estate back just by cleaning up the toolbars to suit my needs. I feel like they should clean them a lot by default, but I can see why they wouldn’t want to get rid of stuff now that people are used to it being there.

    • http://www.linuxmint.com/ Jimbo

      Just to be pedantic, iMovie does not come with OS X, it comes with new Macs, different thing. If you go buy Snow Leopard you don’t get the newest iMovie with it, you have to buy that separately.

    • http://www.linuxmint.com/ Jimbo

      Just to be pedantic, iMovie does not come with OS X, it comes with new Macs, different thing. If you go buy Snow Leopard you don’t get the newest iMovie with it, you have to buy that separately.

  • http://twitter.com/jbl0ndie Jonathon Hodges

    Yes but it’s not like Apple saying, we’re not going to bundle iMovie with OSX, it’s more like saying we’re not going to bundle iTunes with OSX and then everyone says, “Ok, whatever, I’ll just go and download it”.

    The beauty of Ubuntu is that it’s so amazingly easy to get great software as you need it. I’m short of space on my little Eee PC so sometimes I’ll install an application, use it, uninstall it until next time I need it.

    Anyway, it almost doesn’t deserve to be in UNE until someone can hack it to work with small screen devices like netbooks. If someone were able to reduce the height of all the menus and status bars, we’d get a lot more space for workspace on screen of a netbook.

    jblondie

  • Mohan

    I actually liked they pulled it…oh well.

  • pt

    about time some common sense was in place. There is very little to gain from having such an inconsistent policy with applications, when you already a minority in comparison to the Windows OS

  • pt

    about time some common sense was in place. There is very little to gain from having such an inconsistent policy with applications, when you already a minority in comparison to the Windows OS

  • Anonymous

    Am I the only one that had to Wikipedia “Hokey Cokey” to find out that that’s what the Hokey Pokey is called in Britan?

    • Anonymous

      i had to do the same…the internet never ceases to amaze me
      btw, OOo is just more complete, and yes i do use spreadsheets…lots of spreadsheets…blame business school

    • Anonymous

      i had to do the same…the internet never ceases to amaze me
      btw, OOo is just more complete, and yes i do use spreadsheets…lots of spreadsheets…blame business school

  • Anonymous

    Am I the only one that had to Wikipedia “Hokey Cokey” to find out that that’s what the Hokey Pokey is called in Britan?

  • http://ronuts.blogspot.com/ Mister Ro

    A big thumbs-up from me :-)

  • Anonymous

    A big thumbs from me too. I understand why they considered it but making that change to UNE would add too much confusion to new users & newer netbook’s can cope easily with OO. Maybe as a suggestion for lower spec / hard drive size netbooks, maybe they could develop a UNE version for Xubuntu or Lubuntu. This already uses Abiword etc. & would make things more consistent between the different version?? Food for thought maybe?? Cheers.

  • Anonymous

    I’m dissapointed in this change :/

    I’d really like to see Canonical give Gnome-Office more credit. It’s much faster than OpenOffice and for most users I think it would actually be a better solution. I’ve personally ditched OpenOffic and I’ve never looked back.

  • http://www.expatsinksa.com/ Bilal Akhtar

    This decision is helpful for those having netbooks and slow internet connections. OOo would take a LONG time to download on connections below the speed of 256KBPS . Well, Its good that the developers have made some sense and included OOo!

  • http://www.expatsinksa.com/ Bilal Akhtar

    This decision is helpful for those having netbooks and slow internet connections. OOo would take a LONG time to download on connections below the speed of 256KBPS . Well, Its good that the developers have made some sense and included OOo!

    • http://www.best-registrycleaner.net Best Registry Cleaner

      The beauty of Ubuntu is that it’s so amazingly easy to get great software as you need it.

  • http://wakingrufus.myopenid.com/ wakingrufus

    I was a fan of the abiword/gnumeric idea. they are much more lightweight. and gnumeric is better than calc in a number of ways (and yes worse in some others).

  • http://wakingrufus.myopenid.com/ wakingrufus

    I was a fan of the abiword/gnumeric idea. they are much more lightweight. and gnumeric is better than calc in a number of ways (and yes worse in some others).

  • John

    That’s great!
    I was about to switch to another distribution just because they dropped OpenOffice…

  • John

    That’s great!
    I was about to switch to another distribution just because they dropped OpenOffice…

  • http://bigbrovar.aoizora.org/ bigbrovar

    Thanks God Sanity prevailed. Any one who doesn’t like OO.o should remove it. Its much more easier for users to opt out then opt in

  • http://bigbrovar.aoizora.org/ bigbrovar

    Thanks God Sanity prevailed. Any one who doesn’t like OO.o should remove it. Its much more easier for users to opt out then opt in

    • Anonymous

      Actually, when apt-get removing OOo it tries to remove ubuntu-desktop completely, but when doing apt-get install OOo it just installs and does nothing else. Whats the easy way? xD

      • http://bigbrovar.aoizora.org/ bigbrovar

        The ubuntu-desktop is a metapackage. By its self its contains nothing. But installing it would pull other packages which are needed for setting up the Ubuntu setup. Openoffice happens to be about the packages that gets pulled by the Ubuntu-desktop meta-package. So If I installed a command-line only version of ubuntu and I decided to install the Ubuntu GUI desktop. all I would do is installed the ubuntu-desktop metapackage. and it would pull openoffice, evolution and every other packages and application which make up the Ubuntu default install. Removing the meta-package would not harm your computer.

  • Victor

    I have to say I find this to be pretty disappointing. The first thing I have to do when I do an ubuntu install on my netbook is get rid of open office. I have a netbook with a 4 gig flash drive, and quite honestly I don’t need anything else. OpenOffice is overkill in the extreme for the netbook purpose and build. Oh well, there’s always Xubuntu, which is better for netbooks anyway. For all those brilliant individuals out there who want a full office suite and all of Gnome installed on their mini low powered computers, you’re welcome to your bloat. Enjoy it.

  • Victor

    I have to say I find this to be pretty disappointing. The first thing I have to do when I do an ubuntu install on my netbook is get rid of open office. I have a netbook with a 4 gig flash drive, and quite honestly I don’t need anything else. OpenOffice is overkill in the extreme for the netbook purpose and build. Oh well, there’s always Xubuntu, which is better for netbooks anyway. For all those brilliant individuals out there who want a full office suite and all of Gnome installed on their mini low powered computers, you’re welcome to your bloat. Enjoy it.

  • Micah

    Yay. OOo is a great tool. It allows all kinds of compatibility that, although less than perfect, would still certainly be wayyy better than abiword. Don’t get me wrong – I love Abiword, and used it solely for a long time – but their compatibility (EVEN WITH ODT!!) is way lacking. If Abiword would make odt the default and support it fully then I’d probably use it instead (Office 2007 can open/edit .odt files with sp2! Awesome!) because OOo does tend to hog resources, and that’s a drain on my battery. But I think Google Docs is still too young, and underdeveloped, to be sustainable. At the VERY least until Gears is able to make new documents instead of JUST updating already-downloaded ones.

  • Anonymous

    While there at it free up some more room by dumping all of the mono-based stuff out of the default install and leave it in the repositories, that stuff is slow and bloated and this would free up a lot of space

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Tomasz-Slominski/1644176403 Tomasz Slominski

    GNUMeric crashes my entire network xd

  • celem

    When my Dell 910 (2GB Flash drive) self destructed during an update due to insufficient disk space, I replaced it with Xubuntu Abiword and Gnumeric. This left my flash drive half empty. For a “true” netbook, which my machine is, Abiword and Gnumeric are fine, after all, a netbook is supposed to be mostly on the net – hence the name. Of course my desktop has OO. I find Abiword and Gnumeric to be adequate for my “real” netbook.

  • Daniel Hedblom

    Well done, now if canonical would just listen to the outcry about mono and toss it out with the patents and problems surrounding it and it would be a nice distribution again. The only beneficiary of Mono in Ubuntu are Microsoft. I have yet to see a good application written in .net.

  • Masticina Akicta

    I would almost say DUH

    Sure to be fair it is rather big and rather memory heavy but it is the office suite for Linux that everyone can use. And it is nice pre microsof office 2007 in build up so it works like expected.

  • Kim ‘The_Pirate’

    Great!

    Now, if sanity is sporadically breaking out at Canonical – how about dumping Mono for good, and getting The GIMP back into the main distro?

    Or is this just a wet dream….?

    • http://andybleaden.blogspot.com/ andybleaden

      must admit it was a little disappointing not to have Open office there but sorted it myself after a few clicks.guess it reduced the load size and for most people I guess abiword was good enough…even for me if I am honest but I have always liked Open Office

      AndyBleaden