Why most 32bit distros ship with old version of LibO when there are new Open Office versions available ?
 

Hi.

Since I'm assembled in such a way that I believe in an afterlife for old computers, I have some old 32 bit computers that is not thrown away and is still fully functional.

I have tried different Linux distros to see what work best, and it seems that most - if not all the distros ships with old versions of Libre Office (major version 4.x or 5.x).
Libre Office dropped 32bit from version 6.

But, Open Office still have 32 bit support (current version 4.1.10).

So the question is - why doesn't 32 bit distros ship with Open Office instead of Libre Office ?

Your answer seems to be, Uninstall Libre Office and install Open Office if you like it. Or build Libre yourself.

Read the licenses.

https://github.com/apache/openoffice

https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/source-code/
https://github.com/LibreOffice/core

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US.../repositories/
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fedora....437572.0.html

Fedora isn't supporting 32 bit anymore. I haven't been using a 32 bit machine in a while, so I can't tell you much more. Lots of distros have dropped 32 bit support. You may need to build software yourself. Or change distros.

 

That seems like a question that should be directed to people who know the answer: the people responsible for whichever unidentified distros you're talking about.

I would guess it may be because it's simpler to use existing logic of "get latest package X for architecture Y" instead of doing "if architecture A use package B else use package C" but I'm not a distro maintainer so I've no idea.

Though interestingly, there are still 32-bit LibreOffice versions for Windows - and the relevant release notes for when LibreOffice stopped providing 32-bit Linux binaries says:
So it may be entirely possible that those distros can run LibreOffice 6/7 - if they wanted to build it themselves.

Ok, so it probably boils downto the workload for providing this on a 32bit distro is just not worth it. That I can agree to.

And I certainly have no issues spending time on a 32bit Linux installation to uninstall LibO and install Open Office. It's just for the sake of the question and if somebody have some viewpoint on this issue.

And no - I'm not running Fedora on those old computers.

Do the two have the same license?

Habit? They (or the distro they are derived from) use LibreOffice on the 64-bit version, so they keep it on the 32-bit version. Personally, I always replace LibreOffice by OpenOffice anyway, since I prefer the user-interface.

32-bit Libreoffice 6 certainly does exist and works as expected...or, should I say, as they intend it to. I've built it under BLFS with no problems. However Red Hat went mucking around in the source and with a single commit killed off the standard GTK2 VCL plugin in version 6.3. So now by default Libreoffice 6 is a GTK3 / Gnome app with virtually no way of making it look as one would think it should. And the QT5 VCL is utterly hellish and crashes all the time. Not to mention, LO keeps changing the mnemonics (keyboard shortcuts) with EVERY single release. If you can get LO 4/5 with your distribution, either keep it or switch to OpenOffice. Building LO 6+ IMO is just not worth it.

Distributions killing off i686 packages are only doing so out of laziness. I've not encountered a single package in the BLFS book that doesn't build or work on i686.