14 DAY TRIAL // The Fedora developers are now gathering ideas for the new Fedora 19 Schrödinger's Cat that is currently slated to launch in May, if nothing goes wrong.
Fedora 19 seems to be a crucible for new ideas and some of them are not even that crazy. One of the current proposals is to add Apache OpenOffice to the distribution.
“Version 4.0 of OpenOffice brings major and very visible improvements, such as a new and more modern user interface, which are enough to differentiate OpenOffice from other free office suites, like LibreOffice and the older OpenOffice versions (known as ‘OpenOffice.org’ at the time).
“Since the graduation of OpenOffice as a top-level Apache project is relatively recent (October 2012), Fedora could be one of the first distributions to include it after the name change,” stated Andrea Pescetti, a developer at Apache.
According to Pescetti, they would have to fix the inevitable conflicts between the existing LibreOffice and the Apache OpenOffice suite. He also explained why users would have an advantage by using this office suite.
“Users will get access to a robust, modern, supported free office suite, often the suite of choice for Windows users who are becoming interested in free and open source software and who would appreciate to find it in the standard Fedora repositories,” explained Pescetti.
Less than a week ago, another proposal got people interested. The replacement of Gnome 3 with Cinnamon could be a winning move for Fedora 19, but there is little hope this could be done in time for the launch.
“This feature proposes that Fedora switch the default desktop interface from Gnome 3 to Cinnamon. Cinnamon provides a desktop interface that is more familiar to Windows and Gnome 2 users than the standard Gnome Shell interface, while being built from Gnome 3 components,” stated Eric Smith in another proposal.
One thing is certain, Fedora 19 Schrödinger's Cat is poised to be one of the most interesting releases so far, if they manage to get it out in time.