LibreOffice 7.0 Beta 2 Released For This Open-Source, Vulkan-Supported Office Suite

[quikee]

"Most exciting with LibreOffice 7.0 is replacing its Cairo drawing code with Skia."

Skia is not replacing Cairo - that was a mistake in the release notes. Skia is replacing the OpenGL and X11 backend and in the future the GDI backend on Windows and possibly it will be used in macOS too.

[oiaohm]

What is the fuss about? Could someone explain why is the switch to vulkan so important?
I cannot imagine a workload that would require so much GPU processing power to benefit from vulkan. OpenGL should be just fine for drawing antialiased glyphs or even layering gradients and images.

Your right is not about GPU processing as such because that not the worst problem.

I don't think anyone expects Vulkan to do any better than OpenGL for an office suite but along with it having a lot of user mindshare it could also be a preemptive step to move the Mac client towards MoltenVK for if/when Apple does finally pull the plug on OpenGL support.

Vulkan does have a few advantages. Low CPU overhead using Vulkan than Opengl. Vulkan properly support multi threaded supply of content to screen surfaces this will help with the horrible where a person like put 100 images+ to a page.

[Zico]

Will problems with changing UI (user interface) theme (and icon theme) continue?
I've last Gnome and the black theme looks terrible..

[uid313]

I hope that it will feel more fresh, modern, smooth, refined and fun. LibreOffice 6.4 feels very old school.

[szymon_g]

what's the easiest way to install it on ubuntu 20.04? instead or alongside LO6.4

[kenjitamura]

What is the fuss about? Could someone explain why is the switch to vulkan so important?
I cannot imagine a workload that would require so much GPU processing power to benefit from vulkan. OpenGL should be just fine for drawing antialiased glyphs or even layering gradients and images.

I don't think anyone expects Vulkan to do any better than OpenGL for an office suite but along with it having a lot of user mindshare it could also be a preemptive step to move the Mac client towards MoltenVK for if/when Apple does finally pull the plug on OpenGL support.

[R41N3R]

Looking forward to the official release. It sounds very promising with its new Vulkan rendering!

[guiaiolfi]

What is the fuss about? Could someone explain why is the switch to vulkan so important?
I cannot imagine a workload that would require so much GPU processing power to benefit from vulkan. OpenGL should be just fine for drawing antialiased glyphs or even layering gradients and images.

I think it is because Cairo has not received much love for a while. Michael once wrote: "At least from some basic testing, the LibreOffice Skia+Vulkan configuration does appear to be a bit faster when dealing with scrolling / presentation of large documents/spreadsheets." But we don't know if that's because of the transition to Skia or from the Vulkan renderer.

Without any benchmark we can't know for sure.

[pracedru]

had any one tested if transitions in Impress finally work on Linux?

[Leprechaunius]

What is the fuss about? Could someone explain why is the switch to vulkan so important?
I cannot imagine a workload that would require so much GPU processing power to benefit from vulkan. OpenGL should be just fine for drawing antialiased glyphs or even layering gradients and images.