Questions about writing programs

CuddlyClementine said:

My computer runs great. It's only OpenOffice that is being slow.

Just downloaded LibreOffice and it's working perfectly, can load the doc and it runs so smoooooth!

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Ah, somehow missed that salient point. But I had the same problem with OpenOffice. I suspect it's arguing with certain video drivers and is struggling to refresh the screen. LibreOffice incorportated Novell's fixes which made a big difference.

CuddlyClementine said:

No worries! That could make sense though - I updated my drivers a few days ago (the whole screen was starting to flicker, I figured it was time )

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That's not usually drivers, it's usually video memory starting to go. However, if OpenOffice was running its launcher thing all the time, it might have been interfering. That horizontal 'tearing' of the screen happens when it's overloaded and can't refresh the screen in a timely manner.

CuddlyClementine said:

When I opened LibreOffice at first I thought I'd somehow managed to fix open office... nope! It seems exactly the same so switching over seems like a possibility!

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It is the same, just slightly different under the hood -- lots of bugfixes, including performance fixes.

CuddlyClementine said:

(I'm not one for change - she says, moving countries in less than a month)

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You're lost

An open source program named StarOffice was acquired by Sun Microsystems back in 1999 for internal use. They later renamed it OpenOffice and released it to the public. Sun was purchased by Oracle in 2010, and most of the developers left.

Oracle sat on Open Office and in mid-2011, they laid off the remaining staff and ceased development altogether, then donated the whole thing to Apache, who combined it with IBM Lotus Symphony code (another story there) and renamed it Apache Open Office. The current crop of developers working on it are mostly ex-IBM employees.

This whole process shut down development for the better part of two years (between acquisitions, few developers, no developers, or new developers). I have nothing against the Apache/ex-IBM team now running it, but they are behind on basically everything as a result.

LibreOffice should be preferred over OpenOffice for virtually every situation, every computer, and every OS. At least until the Apache team has another year or so to try and catch up.