Can't office suites just get along?

January 25, 2011 6:53 PM

LibreOffice suggests that I uninstall OpenOffice.org. Do I really need to?

In the release notes for LibreOffice 3.3 they offer the following advice:

"For Windows users that have OpenOffice.org installed, we advise to uninstall that beforehand, because it registers the same file type associations."

As I understand it this just means that LibreOffice will register itself as the default program for ODF files and such. Is there more to it than that?

I suppose that the two suites might get into a tug of war over who controls the extension, but that should be easy enough to resolve (tell one of them to not check anymore, etc.).

In other words this warning seems written to be rather ominous, but I don't see any reason to uninstall OOo. Just like I wouldn't uninstall Firefox because I want to install Chrome and both register themselves for .html files. Am I missing something?

I'm hesitant to install LibreOffice because of this warning. I can't afford to lose work because of shenanigans between the two. And there is no way I'm uninstalling OOo just to take Libre for a test run.

posted by oddman to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Yeah, you've got it right. Install away.
posted by zsazsa at 7:42 PM on January 25, 2011

Real techies will be along shortly, I hope, but in my install of LO (on ubuntu) it actually seems to be using basically the same directory structure. I don't think you'll have an implosion, but since LO is planning to take over, it wants your associations. But I have 2 other machines where I haven't switched yet, and they're opening the same odt files (over dropbox) with no problem, so I think you can safely wait, safely replace. But IANYY (iamnotyouryoda).
posted by Mngo at 7:46 PM on January 25, 2011

WP explains: Libre is essentially the continuation of OOo. After Oracle acquired Sun, the developers were afraid Oracle would shut down OOo as they had with OpenSolaris. So they forked the project and are carrying on under the new name.
posted by Gridlock Joe at 8:00 PM on January 25, 2011

Response by poster: I guess I should add I'm not really worried about how LO will work with ODF's or how they will work in conjunction. At this point in the fork I expect that theyboth handle ODF's in essentially the same way. I just want to make sure that they will co-exist peacefully.
posted by oddman at 8:14 PM on January 25, 2011

Remember that recommendations are often written for the least tech savvy members of the userbase. My understanding of what that line means matches your understanding. I would feel very comfortable having them both installed at the same time and assume that the worst that could happen would be I might have to uninstall both, then reinstall the one I wanted to keep, losing any custom settings in the process.
posted by jsturgill at 8:19 PM on January 25, 2011

It's easier and more concise to simply tell inexperienced users to remove a potentially conflicting, essentially redundant program.
posted by asciident at 9:33 PM on January 25, 2011