No LibreOffice Included? (18.0.8.7 Feedback)

Installation Details


Version: Kicksecure 18.0.8.7

Install medium: Sandisk USB (Baremetal no virtualization)

Partition format: ext4 (auto-formatted) + LUKS

Bios: Coreboot


So I noticed LibreOffice is not packaged with Kicksecure?

Please bundle a minimal LibreOffice installation with the most common language packs for North‑American and European users, plus dictionary and thesaurus plug‑ins.

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends \
    libreoffice-writer \
    libreoffice-l10-en-us \
    hungspell-us-en-us \
    mythes-en-us

This is how I installed LibreOffice with document editor alone minimally with dictionary/thesaurus plugin dependency for English only.

(Anyone following along can use the installation command (minimal writer‑only setup, English only above)

For the distro to include all packs with a wildcard like libreoffice-l10-* would increase size too much so which I would assume is why it wasn’t included to keep ISO size small. With english packs alone for my minimal install it was 150 318MB. Where as if you choose more then english it would be 400MB-600MB roughly I would suppose.

318 MB is a lot; our ISO is around 1244 MB at the moment, and while squashfs compression would reduce the size of LibreOffice a lot, it’s still quite a bit of additional bytes (which can make a big difference when it comes to download costs, though I don’t know how much the server hosting costs). It’s simple enough to install the way you did it, some users will want other components like Calc, Draw, Impress, etc. and many users likely don’t have a use for it.

2 Likes

This is a rather difficult balance to strike.

Here in this forum thread is a request for “more”.

Other users are requesting “less”:
Whonix should bundle less pre-installed programs (minimal images) - Development - Whonix Forum

1 Like

The package names listed are not correct as earlier and said not found.

Its libreoffice-l10-en-gb and hunspell-en-gb not “hung” lmao please fix this

1 Like

So I read that Whonix thread and understand both opinions of less or more. However there are some I think could be more in Kicksecure (small dependencies/packages), I’ll save that for another thread.

What your opinions on including global style drop ins for common applications that users might install but aren’t specifically included? In this example LibreOffice.

I read this article:

Which talks about using enterprise style policy for LibreOffice for more “Private and Secure” defaults, which I didn’t even know about personally if I’m gonna be honest. Initially what got me to look is I previously saw a post. It stated that if you export a word document → to PDF format it will append username/computer name to the metadata properties. That might not be a concern for Kicksecure/Whonix since that is user/localhost or user/host. But I was curious about all the others too. Was under the impression it was only like Microsoft Word that did this.

Anyone know if the location where you place registrymodifications.xcu is /etc/libreoffice/registry/res/?

1 Like

I will once i get privledges to my account is to new I think sorry

If your talking about Enterprise Policies what comes to my mind is web browser policies which change all the time and rules get depreciated. Same goes for things like Thunderbird, so as it relates to LibreOffice policy you would have to make sure nothing changes. Even though its not a Mozilla product I believe this relates.

As for the rest, I can’t speak for the anyone else but Kicksecure already kinda uses a guess you could say “Enterprise” style management via *.d/ directories like in /etc for example are used for drop-in configuration files, allowing modular and organized management of global settings for all users on Linux. These files are typically managed by system administrators and in this case locking it down to sysmaint/root user.

1 Like