Do we really need LibreOffice installed by default?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 09:50:21AM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On 09/12/2014 09:26 AM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> Deltarpms help only for updates. No matter what, you need to download
> the full package at least the first time.

Of course, so the image is necessarily larger as a result.  But I
question whether the difference saved by eliminating LO would really
impact people's ability to download.  I'd expect someone who can't
download a 1.2GB image wouldn't have their problem solved by only
downloading a ~750-950MB image.

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