Do we really need LibreOffice installed by default?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 08:39:54AM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On 09/12/2014 08:27 AM, Donald Buchan wrote:
> > I suspect that while the technical merits of removing LO from a
> > default install have their place (ie. large image size, quicker
> > downloads, less update server load, it can be easily discovered in
> > and installed from the repos, there are popular alternatives like
> > cloud suites and alternatives, etc. etc. etc.) it's a major set of
> > packages, *for me*, and I suspect for a significant proportion of
> > users, even if a minority (in which case I concede that that would
> > be a further reason to consider its removal.)
> 
> - From my perspective, the point of offering a Live Media instead of a
> pure installer is so that people can run Fedora and do something
> actually useful on it without having to clobber their existing system
> at first. (The try-before-you-buy scenario)
> 
> We really need to figure out (ideally through user testing), what are
> the tasks that people would want to do before they install Fedora to
> their local system. I'd strongly argue that the most basic set of
> tasks would be:
> 
> 1) Browse the internet
> 2) Check my email
> 3) Read/Write office documents
> 4) Use instant messaging (Google Hangouts, Facebook messenger)
> 
> For Fedora contributors, I might also add
> 4) Connect to IRC
> 
> 
> > Oh, here's one more technical reason to remove it, or at least
> > modify how it's installed:  Although I know that there is a common
> > codebase to the various parts, what about installing LO piece-meal?
> > I use Write and Calc all the time.  I have used Impress in the past
> > but in the past three or four years I've used it perhaps three
> > times.  I've never used Base, Draw, Math or Charts since starting
> > to use OpenOffice.org in 2005.
> > 
> 
> I just performed a little test. Removing Base, Draw, Math and Charts
> from my installed machine saves a whopping 6.3MB. Even if we try to
> account for a few different dependencies, the savings are negligible.
> 
> The vast majority of disk space is taken up by libreoffice-core (241MB
> on its own) and its dependencies.

The utility argument seems pretty strong to me.  Also, I believe
deltarpm is still enabled by default in installations, correct?  That
would tend to cut down on size of updates to download.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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