Hi, Tom.I've thought over a reply for your question for quite sometime, finally decided to just add some thoughts.
Except for a thread on printing labels (which appears to be a printer driver problem in this case), I've not posted here for a very long time.
Nor do I use LO on a regular basis. I use it for labels because the free office suite I'm currently using does not have label capability. And maybe once a year, I write something sort of serious. I do that just to see how much has changed. Here on the Mac, I have Word 2011 for regular use. The free office suite I am using now is FreeOffice from Softmaker, and it's on Windows 7. I like it enough that I'm considering purchasing Softmaker 2016. The free version is 2012.
The attitude of LO devs turned me off years ago, and I've seen nothing since to bring me back. And the icons and UI overall in 5.?.? Geez, my Atari 1040 ST running TOS 4 (I think) had much better icons. People should be ashamed of this new fad in UI appearance, IMO.
Oh, wait. I see there are Themes in 5. Cool. No, there are no Themes to choose from. If you don't have something as simple as themes ready to go, why bother?
I would like to see LO do well, but I don't recommend it for most people anymore. Why? Most people don't need all the bells and whistles of LO. And they don't need Word for the same reason. I tell people to sit down and scrutinize/analyze what they need from an office suite. Do they even need an office suite? Maybe WordPad on Windows and TextEdit on the Mac is all they need. And there's plenty of software between both extremes on both platforms to fill people's needs.
And many times, people will use an office suite to do something, and an office suite is simply the wrong tool for the job at hand.
For those that don't know, Softmaker 2016 (Pro version only, I think) includes a customized copy of Thunderbird. What the differences are, I do not know.
I see a lot of posts around about how good TB is, but most never seem to run into the issues I find. I have no idea why. Just last week I was reminded of a bug in the address book. Edit an entry, and save. Now I have that address in the address book 2 times. Delete one of them, and both go away.
The archive files for one account disappeared for 3 years. Cursor movement has a problem in HTML composition, in that it doesn't go where it belongs.
And the answers to many questions in Mozilla's Thunderbird group for solving problems is to create a new profile and start over. That's NOT a fix. Needless to say, I rarely read that group anymore either.
When it comes to offering support as far as using TB is concerned, if it's to LO's advantage to do so, go for it. But I get so effing tired of having to go to 5 or 10 forums to find answers to program because the answer is not in/on the program's site. For LO, I would offer the extra help to Mozilla's newsgroup so there's one less place to spend time registering and checking in on whatever your regular basis is. Plus, it would give you another avenue of exposure for LO.
IMO, even better TB support would be to help the TB devs solve a lot of the bugs that exist.
The above issues could be solved by absorbing the entire TB effort as you suggested. And is a reasonable solution, IMO. But I hope LO devs take a different attitude than they appeared to have when I was a regular user. Devs seemed to be more interested in adding features rather than fixing issues they knew existed.
Do a few things right rather than a lot of things wrong.Both TB and FF have the same weak link, that of using add-ons. What often happened is folks like me would install add-ons that became part of their workflow. Then both would come out with a new version, breaking the add-on and thus breaking the workflow. Now, do you think that made anyone happy?
I used to extol the virtues of TB and FF, but enough breakage was enough. I just tell people I use them and they work OK.
I think your point of "Freedom from Choice" is driven more by the costs of providing support of many programs. In the US Government agency I worked for, there were limits on what you could install on the computers, if your unit had no local support system. If you were a large enough unit, supplying 100% of the unit's IT support, permission could be obtained to install a program not on the approved list.
I haven't used Outlook since Outlook 2007, and IIRC, the "rules" in Outlook are far more sophisticated than TB's.
I think I'll snip your message and save people the work of having to deal with it. LOL
Best of luck.
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 44.0
Thunderbird 38.0.1
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"
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