LibreOffice 5.3 Beta Available For Beta Testing

[phoronix38]

When trying out betas I would really like an appimage or flatpak so that I do not overwrite my distros installation of LibreOffice. I will send them an e-mail and see if they plan on offering one.

[caligula]

Already done that! Still switching back to Excel because of the performance bottlenecks within LibreOffice Calc and charts. The only thing that helped so war was disabling Antialiasing inside LibreOffice options. Though! It still crawls!

You could also try gnumeric. Libreoffice calc has had an awful performance recently. Maybe it's just too bloated and nobody cares. They're doing "a lot" and each release contains tons on "improvements", but let's be honest, the software is so huge that it's a walking time bomb. They should have switched to some sane language with good resource management such as Rust. It's not even modular, it's a huge monolithic pile of crap.

[sheldonl]

And the UI is still stuck in 1995.

I'll never make serious inroads until they fix it. A very small, very vocal minority of users love the old interface. The silent majority has moved on.

[sheldonl]

In what way? I dread the day it gets The Ribbon™.

I'm just waiting and praying for either MS Office to come native to Linux or for it to get "The Ribbon™" Once you get used to "The Ribbon™" it's impossible to go back and everything else just seems clunky.

[A-Singh]

When trying out betas I would really like an appimage or flatpak so that I do not overwrite my distros installation of LibreOffice. I will send them an e-mail and see if they plan on offering one.

For the time being, you could use the info on this page for a separate installation of Libreoffice.

[Jumbotron]

And the UI is still stuck in 1995.

Yeah....and you're still stuck typing in LibreOffice with a QWERTY keyboard invented in 1873 based on Latin Script which is based on the Latin Language that is more than 3000 years old.

Just because it isn't new and shiny like MicroSuck's ribbon monstrosity doesn't mean it is either useless or impedes work flow. Sometimes certain ideas and designs are close to timeless. They may need a small tweak here and there. But sometimes a wholesale change without context, precedent or proper training and assimilation is disastrous to productivity.

[dkasak]

Ah, the serial trolls. They're turning this place to shit just like what happened with Slashdot. "Waaaaaaa! It doesn't use Qt so I refuse to use it. Waaaaaaa! It doesn't use C++ so I refuse to use it!"

Pathetic.

As for the constant march of updates from the LibreOffice team ... I salute thee!

[RGB-es]

Something really interesting on 5.3 that will provide joy to all the typographic buffs (like myself) is OpenType support using extended font names. The syntax is similar to the Graphite support. You can use real small caps, fractions (not alternative fractions, though), historic ligatures, etc. just by adding a colon and the corresponding OpenType's 4 letters tag to the font name. Of course the font needs to support the feature. For example for EB Garamond 12 you can use

EB Garamond 12:smcp

to obtain real small caps. You can apply several features simultaneously: use a & to add a new tags after the previous one. See here.

[starshipeleven]

You could also try gnumeric. Libreoffice calc has had an awful performance recently. Maybe it's just too bloated and nobody cares. They're doing "a lot" and each release contains tons on "improvements", but let's be honest, the software is so huge that it's a walking time bomb. They should have switched to some sane language with good resource management such as Rust. It's not even modular, it's a huge monolithic pile of crap.

Great trollpost. Bonus points for mentioning Rust in a situation where it's completely irrelevant.

The Libreoffice issue is that the rendering engine still runs like crap in calc, and whoever is using calc does not care about contributing code to fix it as they just switch back to excel (gnumeric is faster, but not as excel).

It's as simple as that. You want it to get better? Do something yourselves.

As long as you whine and troll in forums nothing will get better.

[starshipeleven]

I'm just waiting and praying for either MS Office to come native to Linux or for it to get "The Ribbon™" Once you get used to "The Ribbon™" it's impossible to go back and everything else just seems clunky.

While I agree that the Ribbon has better usability due to modern UI design principles like "showing buttons only when you are actually likely to need them", I'm against the fact that it is wasting a LARGE amount of vertical space to show a bunch of LARGE icons.