Dangling virtual desktop with OpenOffice

Help
1

Since a few months, if OpenOffice is not on the first virtual desktop, actions like browsing the menu or opening dialog boxes cause the current desktop to shift to the first one. This is seen in multiple machines with OpenOffice only.

I could not find a setting that may resolve that. A Wayland issue comes to mind with no other clue.

Would there be some useful tips here to have a stable workspace?

Thank you.

Operating System: Arch Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.21.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.18.2-arch2-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
2

OpenOffice is a zombie for quite a few years now.

You should just do what everyone else is doing and switch to its fork, LibreOffice, which is undergoing very active development.

The suite is available in the Arch repositories.

3

Switching application won’t be helpful to me. And it won’t resolve a problem that is most probably linked to the environment since the same version of OpenOffice has been working without any surprise for so many years. Tests with multiple versions give the same result.

I may understand that developers won’t spend time with OpenOffice, I was just hoping for a known tweak in window management.

Thanks.

4

The “problem” is that the environment evolved, but OpenOffice did not. OpenOffice (and LibreOffice too) uses its own graphic library called VCL with plugins that connect with different toolkits. While LibreOffice is continuously updating both the base libraries and plugins, OpenOffice remained with GTK2 and QT3, both in end of life for many years now. Also, the system where OpenOffice binaries are built is really ancient (more than a decade ancient) so it’s no wonder that those binaries are now starting to fail. In fact, it’s almost a miracle that they are still working at all. You’ll never get proper Wayland nor Qt6 support on OpenOffice, but you’ll get a lot of security holes.

[Personal note, take it as such: back in the day, I used to be an enthusiastic ApacheOpenOffice contributor (member of the AOO-PMC, forum administrator, documentation)… until 2013 when I (and others), tired and frustrated, resigned. That’s why now, with sadness, I beg you to consider moving on and forget OpenOffice, it’s a dead project causing more harm than good to the opensource ecosystem. The sooner people forgets this failed project, the better.]

1 Like
5

Thank you for all these insights, particularly taking into account your background.

(On a personal note too, I am locked with using OpenOffice, so I’ll bear with the inconveniences till retirement soon :wink: )

Regards.