Stanislav Horáček from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:
In the Czech Republic, the beginning of October means that free software enthusiasts meet in Prague at LinuxDays, the biggest event of this kind in the country. This year’s conference was even more awaited, as it was organized after four years of a coronavirus break.
LibreOffice has had its booth here for many years, and we were proud to represent the project again amongst presentations of other open source flagships, and related local organizations. More than thousand of visitors proved that interest didn’t vanish during the break – and many of them stopped at our booth to share their experience, grab some merchandise (provided thanks to TDF), ask a question or discuss a particular topic.
Some popular topics were mentioned quite often. For instance, the online version is much more known and discussed than before; however, sometimes we were still able to surprise attenders that such a tool is available. Also, we didn’t expect that editing of PDF files in Draw is so appreciated, or there was interest in working with LaTeX and Markdown formats.
The conference program offered also specialized talks and some questions reflect extensive knowledge of the visitors. We discussed batch configuration of installed applications using an extension, the experimental version using WebAssembly, and compiling of the software.
Regardless of its importance, it is always rewarding to solve an issue. Thus, we were happy to advise how to construct a specific formula in Calc, and to inform that not saving solver settings (bug #38948) has been fixed in LibreOffice 7.6. Moreover, these two points are examples of issues that were asked by the same visitors already years ago.
It was encouraging to talk with people of the younger generations, including discussions about how they learn office suites in their schools. It seems that the free software world can still offer a lot and be attractive for them.
We hope that these examples of what we touched on during these two intensive days illustrate that offline events provide a valuable point of view on the software and the community, both contributors and users. If there is such a meeting in your country, don’t hesitate to attend it and get (or provide) feedback about our office suite there!
Many thanks to Stanislav, Petr and Zdeněk for attending, and their great help in the LibreOffice project!
