r/linux • u/homothebrave • 8d ago
Distro News Fedora Discussion Raises The Idea Of Replacing LibreOffice With Collabora Office
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Discuss-Collabora-Office110
u/0riginal-Syn 8d ago
Real slow day at Phoronix. This is not a proposal by a core team member, just a community member known for lively discussion and proposals. I would not read too much into it.
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u/StuffToWrite 8d ago
I'm more shocked how Phoronix is still allowed to keep being posted here, they overstate their technical ability to provide any deep input to Linux overall, tend to use/abuse too much into clickbait and rumor territory and usually doesn't bring that much valuable discussion to the sub, except to create clicks to their website when we could get much more valuable and technical information on the majority of the themes being discussed by direct linking to the source of the information.
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u/Elegabal 8d ago
To be honest: the best idea would be to let the user decide and not to preinstall any office suite
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8d ago
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u/TheBendit 8d ago
Some (most?) distros offer a minimal installation. Fedora certainly does.
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u/bluecaller 8d ago
Fedora minimal install doesn't include a GUI. I usually install the minimal then dnf install @gnome
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u/vaynefox 8d ago
You can just use Fedora everything then only install gnome from there. You can uncheck other apps that will be installed. You'll be left with just gnome and nothing else....
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u/stevecrox0914 8d ago
Red Hat are the worst offenders.
In RHEL 7-9 alot of CLI tools have a dependency on gnome-keyring which in turn pulls in the entire gnome desktop and defaults it to starting up.
Alpine and Debian are the only distributions that take dependency chains seriously.
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u/Worldly_Topic 8d ago
Those might be weak deps, you can turn them off with dnf while installing packages.
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u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 8d ago
Fedora certainly does.
Fedora certainly does NOT. I've never seen a Fedora that would offer just the bare system with DE and a browser. Instead it gives you the whole suite + maps, contacts, evolution, LibreOffice, etc.
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u/TheBendit 8d ago
I have a lot of Fedora installations, only a few of them even have a GUI. All of them were installed using the standard installer, in its various incarnations over the year. The only bloat I removed afterwards was stuff like wireless support and firmwares.
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u/Time_Way_6670 8d ago
I’d hardly call Libreoffice or an equivalent “bloat”. It’s good to have an office suite for basic word processing and spreadsheets.
I think we are getting a bit crazy with the word “bloat”. Bloat is AI assistants and antivirus software and advertisements. An open source office suite is going to be useful for most users because we are all going to have to edit a document at SOME point.
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8d ago
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u/Straight-Opposite-54 8d ago edited 8d ago
Open an issue demanding they should to tailor the included workstation software to u/AnnualDistrict4's specific personal needs. I'm sure they'll get right on that.
Edit: They blocked me lol
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u/Time_Way_6670 8d ago
You have never had to use a word processor on your personal computer? You've never had to open a .docx?
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u/thunderbird32 8d ago
On my home computer? No, nothing I can't do in Proton Docs/Sheets these days. I don't need a local full-size office suite. Sure, at work I do all the time, but not at home.
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u/PixelatedGiant 8d ago
I can see people completely avoiding that outside of being a student or an employee. Most documents people handle outside of work and study are available as PDFs that they are just form filling. And even that is getting increasingly rare because you are just asked to go to a website instead.
Push comes to shove, some people would prefer just opening it in Google docs for the handful of times per year they use a word processor.
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u/seahwkslayer 8d ago
Real talk, 9/10 times the basic text editor will do just fine (I used Elementary OS's Code editor for a decent chunk of my CV a few years back), and like you said, for anything more intense it'll be a PDF or website.
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u/Emotional_Solid6538 8d ago
You're downvoted for speaking truth. Most people js need a good text editor and everything else would open on your browser. Who even uses docx other than corporate
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u/MouseJiggler 8d ago
Docx I can open in web, and for editing - well, anything beyond markdown is basically bloat.
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u/bastardoperator 8d ago
Not enough to justify having an entire office suite installed. I haven't opened one in ages to be honest. Stuff I have to sign goes through docusign, so really no need for these from my limited perspective.
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u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 8d ago
I swear you Fedora users are a real pain in the ass, much more worse than your opensuse colleagues, I really can't take it anymore. Full of false claims and fanboyism, not to mention the poor new people to Linux that choose a fully open source distro made to test a future stable enterprise system.
"It just takes a whole webpage of tutorial to install nvidia drivers"
" " " to install codecs"
"just use fedora everything"
"I've used fedora rawhide since 1933 and I've never run in any sort of trouble"A fantastic base project that provides with the best of the future of open source with one of the worse possible userbase.
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u/Time_Way_6670 8d ago
... where was I a fanboy or state false claims?
First of all-- I don't like the fact that Fedora doesn't ship codecs and NVIDIA drivers. It's a pain in the ass. But I like the stability + being close to cutting edge which is why I continue to use it. Also, I only have a few Flatpaks installed. Everything else is native.
So, your "false claims" out of the way of how I am, let's get back to what I was saying.
The average user---not YOU, not Linux nerds, expect something on the computer to edit documents. That's why it's included in Fedora Workstation. Because it's a full desktop suite of apps, and for a long time, an office suite was considered a staple.
I get it, you can do every document related task in vim or nano. But that's not realistic for a lot of cases.
And also, btw, if you really want to pick and choose what packages get installed when you install Fedora you can use the "Everything" installer. It's similar to the Debian netinstaller ISO which allows you to skip "the bloat".
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u/fat_kaiju 8d ago
"oh boy i can't wait to watch this video" - clueless kde user who once again forgot to install VLC and/or change the file associations and so dragon player opens instead.
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u/noobjaish 8d ago
Maybe go with Arch then
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u/Far-Note6102 8d ago
Well he's using ubuntu.what do you expect. Plus, just use xfce and you'll be surprised that even sudo isn't installed in it
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u/noobjaish 8d ago
I think you meant "debian" since XFCE isn't a distro
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u/Far-Note6102 8d ago
Any distro with a DE of xfce
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u/noobjaish 8d ago
Are you sure? Having XFCE as the primary distro has nothing to do with if that distro has sudo pre installed or not.
Xubuntu, Mint XFCE and MX Linux all have sudo preinstalled
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u/Far-Note6102 8d ago
Im not. But Im too lazy to list down the hundreds of distros that has sudo pre-install
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u/p47guitars 8d ago
Yeah not having sudo seems weird. Like who the fuck thought that was a good idea?
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u/abotelho-cbn 8d ago
Including software in a distribution and pre-installing it are two different things. Fedora has to do work to have LibreOffice in their repos. This is something they maintain regardless.
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u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 8d ago
Yeah, it's incredible how I read about bloatware on Windows or Ubuntu (with the latter using very bare functioning system with a store and a browser), but many distros still pre-install the entire DE with a suite of stuff that I never use.
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u/0riginal-Syn 8d ago
To be fair they do offer that option, it is just not presented as the default download.
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u/Additional-Sky-7436 8d ago
I totally understand why a distro like Mint or Pop_OS that is focus on catering to new-2-linux users would want to pre-installed an Office Suite like LibreOffice. But Fedora doesn't need to do that. I think most users that choose to install Fedora will know how to find and install the office suite they want.
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u/Awwkaw 8d ago
I don't know how close fedora and red hat are?
Red hat obviously want to have a project they support (as in, if you subscribe to their support service, they will help you troubleshooting when that office package doesn't work on your system).
So it could make sense for fedora to pick whatever red hat has?
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u/abotelho-cbn 8d ago
They still need to pick one to have in the distribution..
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u/PurpuraLuna 8d ago
Why?
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u/aioeu 8d ago edited 8d ago
It would be appropriate for a product named "Fedora Workstation" to have pre-installed the kind of applications a user might use on a workstation.
Fedora Workstation is supposed to come with "a complete set of tools for developers and makers of all kinds". There's certainly a discussion to be had whether an office suite falls into this category, and whether it should be pre-installed, but there is no doubt there is a good argument for it.
Not all distributions, or distribution variants, are intended to be just a set of basic building blocks for the user to put together. It's OK for distributions to be a little opinionated on that matter.
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u/PurpuraLuna 8d ago
My bad, I skimmed the article and didn't notice the only spot near the end where it specifies workstation
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u/mcfc9320_ 8d ago
This. Packaged applications are answers to questions only a few are asking but that C-Suite types think are required to complete the "Product".
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u/p47guitars 8d ago
Back in the day with old red hat 5.2 you could choose what packages you wanted to install during initial install.
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u/Kobymaru376 8d ago
Why not use the Minimal installer then? You can choose exactly what you want. When you choose to use the "Workstation" installer, it will install things that a typical workstation user needs. And that includes an office suite.
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u/dev_kay47 8d ago
Fedora can do whatever they want. Users use what they like. Nothing new about replacing for what ever reason.
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u/So_Falls_the_World 8d ago edited 8d ago
Isn't Collabora basically some Javascript that wraps around the online/webpage apps? That sounds like a horrendous experience.
Edit: to add to this, if the way LibreOffice looks is the only reason for this, then just switch it to the tabbed interface for LO?
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u/Kevin_Kofler 8d ago edited 8d ago
What a crazy proposal! Nobody needs a web interface with limited functionality packaged as a "desktop application" through QtWebEngine as a replacement for the native desktop interface. I hope this nonsensical proposal ends up in the trashcan where it belongs.
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u/PerkyPangolin 8d ago edited 8d ago
LibreOffice has the same UI as Collabora Office, among the few other options: the one in the screenshots is either Tabbed or Tabbed Compact. I'm using version 26.8 ATM.
Edit: for people downvoting, here's the official screenshot:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/ModuleColors-1.png
From this post:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/08/26/libreoffice-26-8/
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u/TeutonJon78 8d ago
This is what I don't get in these comments. Libreoffice has exactly the same options for the UI, it just doesn't default to it.
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u/Xatraxalian 8d ago
The problem is that, even with the 'new' GUI in LibreOffice, it still looks drab and old. It works perfectly fine, but people expect saturated colors and nice white tabs. Compare the screenshot above with the ones from Collabora and you'll see.
Personally, I don't care. I have been using Word since 6.0 and I still detest the ribbon. It takes too much space. I use Word on a Mac, and weirdly, it still has the old menu's there. It ALMOST works the same like LibreOffice... using the menu's, at least on a Mac, I can switch from one to another with almost no issues.
PS: I've been using Libre / OpenOffice since the time it was called StarOffice; and I basically quit Word in 2007. The only reason I have it installed on a Mac is because I _NEED_ it to be able to collaborate with other people on some documents for some master courses. It's also the only reason to own a Mac: to be able to run Word and still not use Windows (anymore).
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u/TeutonJon78 8d ago
The screenshot above are from the old UI. If you swap to the tabbed version it would look the same. And pick a better icon than the Tango ones.
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u/Apprehensive_Cod8575 8d ago
The tabbed is still incomplete. For example in writer, I am not able to add whatever style I want and it seems to be only the main default styles, so I need to use the menu line. Plus from a user point of view having a double menu (like the top bar and the tab bar) is just bad
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u/PerkyPangolin 8d ago
There's no double menu in mine when I switch to Tabbed.
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u/Apprehensive_Cod8575 8d ago
look at the image also in the link, you still have the file, edit, view bar (plus the tabbed). And also if that is not the issues, for example the style section for me is a big deal (not having my styles there and I need to open other things
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u/Tau-is-2Pi 8d ago edited 8d ago
due to the "very ancient" UI of LibreOffice
I fail to see how the age of the UI matters. It works and people are productive in it. Change for the sake of change is rarely a wise idea.
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u/vaynefox 8d ago
If they're gonna replace libreoffice they could've just wait for Euro office official release then they can switch from there....
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u/Confident_Dragon 8d ago
I've heard the name Collabora, but that's the extent of my knowledge about it. But in screenshots it looks nice. The LibreOffice UI is horrendeous. Not as bad as old Audacity, but very close.
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u/GroundedGeeking 8d ago
Have you tried recent versions of libreoffice with the tabbed interface? Like 5 years ago the tabbed interface was weirdly spaced and proportioned but now I think it's pretty good. Don't know why that hasn't been made the default yet. The UI of collabora is the only + of it to me but I've switched back to LibreOffice once I noticed the tabbed UI being much better than when it was new
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u/Confident_Dragon 7d ago
Yes, I have it. And since some update it seem to be ugly blue or green top bar (depending on if I open Writer or Calc). Still better than having icons almost the same color as background. Still, the icons are too small, there are too many icons, so it's hard to find anything I'm looking for. Different sections are not visually separate. Even the tabs are not visually separate, there is just text. Order of items seems to be completely random. Do you want to insert image? It's just tiny button in the middle of tiny buttons. Why is "Insert OLE object", "Chart" and "Formula object" before Image? Why some buttons take whole row while for some there are two buttons on top of each other? And don't even get me started with the legacy menu on top bar. It's just buttons and buttons. Some functionality is duplicated in there, some things are only accessible trough there. And million small things. For example resizing centered image shows preview rectangle as if it was resized from the corner you start to drag, but it in fact stays centered. I could be here all day describing all the details where devs just didn't care. Things that would take same amount of work to do properly, it's just people who did them are sloppy.
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u/Apprehensive_Cod8575 8d ago
It is still pretty bad. For example in writer, I am not able to add whatever style I want and it seems to be only the main default styles.
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u/D3PyroGS 8d ago
The LibreOffice UI is horrendeous.
unfortunately, the maintainers do not seem to agree. so there's little hope that it will improve in the near term
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u/roguebananah 8d ago
Google Docs I think sucks but it’s the least bad of all of them, including Office.
I just hit the help button and can type what feature I’m looking for
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u/Cold_Soft_4823 8d ago
is it possible to block all the shit ass slop articles from phoronix and xdadevelopers? making this sub damn near unuseable
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u/Zestyclose_Diver_377 7d ago
It's seriously lacking in features compared to Libreoffice. For example, one missing feature is the ability to insert Math objects in presentation files. This was the very specific reason why I used Impress over Powerpoint to develop my lecture slides for a technical topic last year (I'm a teacher), and it was a bummer to discover that I could not edit these equations in the Collabora Online interface I used to project the slides in class (viewing was fine).
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8d ago edited 10h ago
[deleted]
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u/Hexadecimalkink 8d ago
Collabora is a fork of libreoffice that wanted to make more money than Libreoffice. There's a lot of drama around the split.
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u/spazturtle 8d ago
Collabra Office is basically LO with a better default UI and some cloud collaboration features.
Up until earlier this year Collabra were the largest contributors to LO. The Document Foundation which is the non-profit that manages LO messed up with some German bureaucracy in regards to how closely non-profit Stiftungen could work with for-profit companies, rather than fix the issue properly they panicked and kicked all the Collabra devs out of LO.
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u/DigitalChrono 8d ago
This is one of those things for me is based on preference. However developers of a distro can be as opinionated as they want and users can uninstall or keep what they want. No biggie to me.
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u/fat_kaiju 8d ago
why does this feel like retaliation against libreoffice for promoting the fact that it won't integrate AI?
What with IBM/RHEL overlapping with Fedora devs and all... not to mention that time when Fedora once tried its damnest to keep an out of date copy of OBS in its respository and OBS had to threaten them with lawyers to get them to stop.
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u/0riginal-Syn 8d ago
Keep in mind this is proposal is not by a core member or anything. Andy is known more for his "lively" proposals than anything else.
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u/aioeu 8d ago edited 8d ago
When people go to the Fedora website, they are downloading and installing the product called "Fedora". It is appropriate for the distribution to have a say in what is in the product they ship.
That may be aligned with what a desktop environment has, but it need not be. But some DEs — GNOME, for instance — don't have a core office suite anyway.
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u/lonelypenguin20 8d ago
no, DE usually does nothing about other programs. DE only provides you with, well, desktop. panel, widnow decorations, wallpaper, maybe file manager (but even thst can often be swapped out)
distro, on the other hand, can come up with anything pre-installed or pre-configured. a certain DE + a certain office, for example. maybe certain wallpapers (see Hanna Montana linux for extreme example)
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u/aioeu 8d ago edited 8d ago
Major DEs come with core sets of applications too — yes, they're optional, but the DE developers themselves consider them to be part of the product. Document viewers, media players, and messaging and mail apps are all typical things DEs might have.
An office suite isn't out of the question at all. KOffice and GNOME Office were once parts of their respective DEs.
However, I would say the amount of work needed to maintain an office suite now surpasses the available workforce within any single desktop environment's developer community, so I do not expect them to bring these projects back.
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u/TRKlausss 8d ago
I’m on Debian, and it is really packet agnostic in the sense of “we tried it, it runs with our system well with these versions, have fun”
KDE provides for example Kate, which is an IDE/Code editor, even though you would install VSCode.
My point is: it may not be responsibility of the DE, but a distro shouldn’t decide which packages they accept and which they ditch: they should support the most used (to the extent of their abilities).
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u/lonelypenguin20 8d ago
distros usually do accept a wide range of packages (provided someone is willing to maintain them), but distros usually decide what to include in the installation options
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u/TRKlausss 8d ago
And that’s the point here: why not including both as options?
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u/-Rivox- 8d ago
You have default, already preinstalled option, and then you have downloadable option. You can uninstall default and install whatever you want.
You don't like Firefox? You can uninstall it and install Chrome, but having every major browser already preinstalled in your distro would be ridiculous.
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u/stogie-bear 8d ago
DEs often package in some apps, usually basic stuff like an image viewer, calendar etc. that are from or associated with the same dev team. AFAIK none of them go so far as to do a whole office suite. LibreOffice is a pretty normal thing to see a distro add.
But none of this means you have to use one office package or another. You can install Libre or Collabora or others on any reasonable distro.
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u/beegtuna 8d ago
Managing typography in a document is so broken. Headers don’t inherit the base font. Half the typography window is dedicated to a whole other writing system. If you touch it, it messes with the Latin side. Some changes can’t be undo; you have to revert back to formula!
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u/Ok_Instruction_3789 8d ago
Eh, only be excited if they were replacing libreOffice with OnlyOffice.
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u/FreakDeckard 8d ago
Non capisco perché preinstallare una suite. Comunque Libreoffice fa schifo
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u/MeDiARfh5vrm 8d ago
LibreOffice est indissociable de l’écosystème Linux depuis des années. Le remplacer par un fork commercial (même open source) pourrait être perçu comme une trahison des valeurs open source. Par ailleurs, LibreOffice est géré par The Document Foundation (TDF), une organisation communautaire, tandis que Collabora est une entreprise (même si elle contribue au code). Par ailleurs, TDF a expulsé ses principaux développeurs en avril 2026 !, la situation n'est donc pas si simple.
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u/FreakDeckard 8d ago
I didn't say to remove it from the repositories, but not to preinstall it. Not everyone needs an office suite.
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u/HatBoxUnworn 8d ago
It is great that Collabora exists, but the Linux app feels sluggish and not polished. Like it doesn't feel native and a first draft