LibreOffice for Haiku, a not-so-short story

And so Amiga/BeOS/Atari day continues! We've already reported that LibreOffice now runs on Haiku, so here's a recap on the long road it has taken Haiku developers to get it working.

As many of you are already aware, LibreOffice is now available on Haiku. This has been a long journey that has started for me around 2014, when I was looking for things I could do for the project. LibreOffice port was one of those things. It seemed to need so much effort, most people didn't even want to start. That's understandable given people were busy developing the OS. However, it's not the first time someone tried to do it.

I'm a bit of a spoil-sport here in that I'm not a particular fan of ports, and as an old BeOS user I greatly prefer software that's been developed exclusively for BeOS/Haiku. At the same time, I obviously realise that's simply not realistic for complex software packages such as office suits, and as such, relying on LibreOffice is by far the most optimal tradeoff in making sure Haiku can be used for office tasks.