LibreOffice 6.4 Branched - Beta Release Underway With QR Code Generator, Threading Improvements

[torsionbar28]

I've been using the LO suite on Linux since it was StarOffice 4.0 in the late 1990's. It's more than adequate for typical light home and student use. IMO it's the complex business document layouts with lots of custom formatting and images where it stumbles. It would be nice to see more threading and parallelization to take advantage of modern multicore CPU's. But I can appreciate the challenge this poses for the developers. Suits my needs fine as-is, so I'll continue to use it, and glad to see development continues to march forwards on this MS Office alternative. Some of us have no interest in sharing our data with the big web app providers.

[danmcgrew]

Perhaps I'm missing something: when did a point increase in the version number, of any piece of software, become a "branch"?

[jacob]

I've been using the LO suite on Linux since it was StarOffice 4.0 in the late 1990's. It's more than adequate for typical light home and student use. IMO it's the complex business document layouts with lots of custom formatting and images where it stumbles. It would be nice to see more threading and parallelization to take advantage of modern multicore CPU's. But I can appreciate the challenge this poses for the developers. Suits my needs fine as-is, so I'll continue to use it, and glad to see development continues to march forwards on this MS Office alternative. Some of us have no interest in sharing our data with the big web app providers.

I would say it stumbles on complex documents... created with MS Office. I've been using LO Writer to create very complex documents and not only it does handle them just fine, it handles them much better than Word. Frankly, using complex templates with numbering, cross-references, formatting rules etc. in Word is a pain because for the most part those features just plain don't work, full stop. In LO Writer they do.

That's the word processor. On the other hand, LO Calc in my opinion is a poor man's substitute for Excel. But for those who work primarily with structured text documents, I see LO not as an adequate alternative, but as a clearly superior alternative to MS Office. My biggest issue with it is that the API documentation is terrible when it exists and writing custom macros for it is not for the faint of heart.

[danmcgrew]

@12 --torsionbar28:

"I've been using the LO suite on Linux since it was StarOffice 4.0 in the late 1990's. It's more than adequate for typical light home and student use. IMO it's the complex business document layouts with lots of custom formatting and images where it stumbles..."

This is a sad testimonial to something which has been a work-in-progress for ten years, has wasted a veritable ton of money; has a large managerial organization behind it (but no visible developers); and STILL, to this day, can not provide seamless, error-free Word compatibility. It's been ten years. No progress. "...stumbles..." is one of the most charitable things to be said about LibreOffice, after all these years.

"It's more than adequate for typical light home and student use..."

This would be a very true statement, but for the fact of how bloated--at >500 MB--the program is. If one wants a truly and really superb more-than-adequate package, the combination of Abiword and Gnumeric puts LibreOffice to shame. Simply check out the Gnumeric spreadsheet--completely. LO's Calc is much worse than bush league compared to Gnumeric, and get this: Gnumeric is a one MEGABYTE program.

Time to stop being "wowed" by how big it is, folks. The sad fact of the matter is that The Document Foundation has now very conclusively proven, by how much time has been absolutely wasted with no concrete results, that it is no longer deserving of being given "...just a little more time...".

[archsway]

This would be a very true statement, but for the fact of how bloated--at >500 MB--the program is. If one wants a truly and really superb more-than-adequate package, the combination of Abiword and Gnumeric puts LibreOffice to shame. Simply check out the Gnumeric spreadsheet--completely. LO's Calc is much worse than bush league compared to Gnumeric, and get this: Gnumeric is a one MEGABYTE program.

What distribution are you using?

$ pacman -Si gnumeric | grep Size
Download Size   : 12.24 MiB
Installed Size  : 46.70 MiB
$ sudo pacman -S gnumeric
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (4) goffice-0.10.45-1  lasem-0.4.4-1  libgsf-1.14.46+3+g7f927f0-1  gnumeric-1.12.45-2

Total Download Size:   14.56 MiB
Total Installed Size:  63.62 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

[archsway]

And how is LibreOffice 500MB?

$ sudo pacman -S libreoffice-fresh
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) libreoffice-fresh-6.3.2-2

Total Download Size:   100.28 MiB
Total Installed Size:  321.37 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

That's less than 65% what you claimed it to be.

[starshipeleven]

Given that GNOME is the default desktop in both Ubuntu and Fedora, I very much doubt that its users are a "minority". No matter what KDE or XFCE people would want us to believe, very few users really care about customising their installation or even using alternative distro spins.

FYI: average Linux user is not the same as average Windows user.

[slacka]

Try dealing with a Writer file that has images and pictures on every page. LO slows to barely usable speeds and scrolling is like watching a laggy frameskip animation.

Have you tested it with 6.4? This has actually been an area where they have made a lot of improvement lately. If your document is still affected, can you file a bug report and attach your doc or share it on a a file hosting service?

[torsionbar28]

I would say it stumbles on complex documents... created with MS Office. I've been using LO Writer to create very complex documents and not only it does handle them just fine, it handles them much better than Word. Frankly, using complex templates with numbering, cross-references, formatting rules etc. in Word is a pain because for the most part those features just plain don't work, full stop. In LO Writer they do.

Excellent point and yes this is what I meant to say. My experience has been similar when each application is working with its native format. LO Writer has been rock solid in this regard. MS Word on the other hand, I literally cannot count the number of times Word has crashed on me over the years when working with a large native Word document.