LibreOffice 6.3 Released With Better Performance, UI Enhancements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice 6.3 Released With Better Performance, UI Enhancements

After a slight delay, The Document Foundation this morning announced the release of the LibreOffice 6.3 cross-platform open-source office suite...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...e-6.3-Released

[ms178]

I hope they do improve the handling of footnotes further as I need features such as cross-referencing with automatical updates. Also the interoperability with Word concerning this feature wasn't seamless either...

[c117152]

Congrats. I've been waiting for that one particular Notebookbar fix for years...

[uid313]

What do you like and dislike with LibreOffice? What do you think could be better and would like to see?

As for me, I would like to see it come with beautiful templates so that you can focus on content and effortlessly make beautiful presentations and documents. Maybe it needs overall a bit more polish.

[ms178]

I also found the equivalent to Powerpoint from Google Docs to be more pleasent and more intuitive to work with than LibreOffice.

[EarthMind]

Hey Michael, can you please make the YouTube vids mobile compatible? They currently appear too wide on smartphone and are in that way inconsistent with the page's layout

[kpedersen]

What do you like and dislike with LibreOffice? What do you think could be better and would like to see?

I like that it has been extremely boring for a while now. This is good.

For my purposes it is actually feature complete. All we need to do now is maintain it well and wait for Microsoft to stop providing an offline version of MS Office. Finally then I think LibreOffice stands a really good chance of becoming the standard; even once Microsoft brings back an offline version of MS Office because the dated "cloud" architecture doesn't work.

(Then we wont need to worry about time-sucking tasks like keeping docx support in sync.)

What I do not want to see is a non-optional dependence on OpenGL 3.3, OpenCL or some other mad shite that FOSS software seems to be going for these days.

[Mathias]

What I really hate about LibreOffice, the Appimage Download Page doesn't show what version I am downloading. Only "Fresh" and "Still". So I download the fresh version, but that's not yet updated... Thanks.

[jacob]

I like that it has been extremely boring for a while now. This is good.

For my purposes it is actually feature complete. All we need to do now is maintain it well and wait for Microsoft to stop providing an offline version of MS Office. Finally then I think LibreOffice stands a really good chance of becoming the standard; even once Microsoft brings back an offline version of MS Office because the dated "cloud" architecture doesn't work.

(Then we wont need to worry about time-sucking tasks like keeping docx support in sync.)

What I do not want to see is a non-optional dependence on OpenGL 3.3, OpenCL or some other mad shite that FOSS software seems to be going for these days.

I think there are still a few big missing features. For one, the documentation of LO's internal APIs and, more generally, macro development and customisation, is next to nonexistent. It's also lacking proper PDF import (as a text document) and built-in OCR.

Re OpenGL etc., I don't know why we should complain about that. What would you like to base a modern UI on? And it shouldn't be made optional either IMHO, because that would just add huge complexity for developers, create problems for third party plugins/extensions and such. It's not so much Microsoft who's holding FOSS back on the desktop these days, it's the *nix so-called philosophy of no integration, no predictability, no baseline features, no dependencies, to accommodate all four Void Linux users or similar. The first step in my opinion is precisely to ditch that mentality and develop FOSS applications using the same way they are designed on Windows and MacOS,.

[kpedersen]

OpenGL etc., I don't know why we should complain about that. What would you like to base a modern UI on? And it shouldn't be made optional either IMHO.

Once we can reliably run OpenGL 3.x+ in a VM, entirely software based or remotely then perhaps, but until then we are simply too far behind Microsoft's RemoteFx / RDP for GPU reliance to be acceptable in the enterprise. We would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

It would even cause issues for Linux in the hobbiest market; I don't think things like the Raspberry Pi can run OpenGL 3.3 (OpenGLES 3.2 I think is the very latest for the Pi 4).

Basically it will reduce the number of FOSS users even lower than there already is. Especially for poorer households (where FOSS was originally a large benefit to). Whilst we sit on our fat gamer PCs, we should show some restraint and not "want it all!". Especially for such a pointless thing like slightly smoother scrolling in a spreadsheet