Do we really need LibreOffice installed by default?

[Stephen Gallagher]

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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.
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