Do we really need LibreOffice installed by default?

[Donald Buchan]

On Fri, 2014-09-12 at 08:39 -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)

Certainly from the "try before you buy" scenario then I personally would
wonder ( http://www.malak.ca/blog/?p=227 ) why it would be missing.
Someone else, maybe not, who knows?  (Hence why I think that a killer
app or suite of apps would still be needed, regardless of what they
are.)

> 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. 

(snip)

I was starting to think that after I'd sent my message.

And if LO proves to be wanted by a sufficient minority and removing it
would be considered "a good thing", then as I said I personally would
have no difficulty installing it on my own anyway.  (In any case, I'm a
more general-use case user and don't fall into the target developper
audience, and I have sufficient technical savvy to tailor my system to
what I want it to do.)

> > 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.

Thanks!