LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha 1 Released With Its Skia + Vulkan Rendering

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.0 is out this week for testing ahead of the planned official release of this big open-source office suite update in August.

LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha 1 is available for easy testing on Linux, macOS, and Windows systems. Download links and more details on the LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha 1 release via the LO QA blog.

LibreOffice 7.0 most notably ships with the new Skia rendering code for faster/better user-interface rendering (replacing its previous Cairo usage) and most notably this now provides for a Vulkan acceleration code path for the office suite. Those running LibreOffice 7.0 on modern hardware should find much better performance than previous versions of this office suite.

LibreOffice 7.0 is also retiring its Adobe Flash support, HiDPI scaling with its Qt 5 bits, and other performance work we have been tracking.

The in-progress release notes for LibreOffice 7.0 also mention new spreadsheet functions for Calc, various import/export filter improvements, a new icon theme, and much more.