LibreOffice 7.0 is aiming for release in early August but for that release to be a success they need help in testing.

There still is two months to go until the stable release of LibreOffice 7.0 but today marks the availability of the first beta.

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.

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows.

Many likely didn't realize the functionality was still in place, but LibreOffice 7.0 will finally phase out its export support for Adobe Flash (SWF).

With the release of LibreOffice 7.0 in a few months, the open-source office suite will now prefer building at least portions of its code-base with the LLVM Clang compiler over GCC or Microsoft MSVC even if the default compiler is not Clang.

With the in-development LibreOffice 7.0 one of the headlining changes is making use of Google's Skia library and with that is Vulkan rendering support. That initial implementation was using Skia to draw the UI while now it's also picking up text rendering responsibilities.

The LibreOffice open-source office suite's Qt5 tool-kit integration so far has lacked HiDPI scaling support for dealing with modern high pixel density displays. But adding to the excitement for the LibreOffice 7.0 release later this year is now the Qt5 HiDPI scaling capability.

Landing last November in the LibreOffice development code was Skia drawing support to replace Cairo and in turn that opens up for Vulkan rendering of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 6.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 6.4 is set to be released in the coming days while succeeding that will now be LibreOffice 7.0.

While LibreOffice 6.4 isn't even coming out until the end of January, we are already stoked about the follow-on release to this open-source office suite... Currently the development builds are towards LibreOffice 6.5 (though given the big impact we wouldn't be surprised if it morphed into LibreOffice 7.0) and one of the features that landed at the end of November is the Cairo drawing being replaced by Skia and with that Vulkan-based rendering support for this free office suite.

With LibreOffice 6.4 branched ahead of its release next year, feature development is open on what will be the next follow-on release for later in 2020. And this week one big underlying code change was merged... Using Skia for drawing the interface in an effort to ultimately replace the Cairo usage.

As of this morning LibreOffice 6.4 was branched from master and the beta release tagged with those LO 6.4 Beta binaries expected out shortly.

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

Following last month's LibreOffice 6.3 alpha milestone, the first beta images of LibreOffice 6.3 are now up for testing.

Tagged at the start of the week was LibreOffice 6.3 Alpha 1 as the first step towards the next major release of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

If Microsoft Office 2019 isn't your thing, The Document Foundation is today debuting LibreOffice 6.2 as the latest major release for this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 6.2 was branched from master this weekend and the first beta release tagged for this open-source, cross-platform office suite.

In an interesting flurry of commits since yesterday, a new custom widgets theme is landing inside this open-source office suite.

Recently there's been more improvements for LibreOffice with its Qt5 integration to allow this open-source office suite to jive better with Qt5-based desktops like KDE Plasma and now LXQt.

The past year LibreOffice has sported a Qt5 interface plug-in for better integration with Qt-based environments like a better "KDE 5" experience. In recent days has been more improvements to this Qt5 integration.

LibreOffice 6.1 will officially be hitting the web in a short time as the latest major feature release to this newest cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 6.1 is planned for release by the middle of August but for that next version to happen without a hitch, the LibreOffice team could use a hand with the testing of their latest release candidates.

Several months back LibreOffice developers began working on better integration with KDE Plasma 5 and that has advanced again today with now having a native file picker.

It's too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.1, but LibreOffice 6.2 will feature PDF importing improvements.

LibreOffice has reached its hard feature freeze and branching period with the first beta release being imminent.

LibreOffice 6.1 Alpha 1 was tagged overnight as the first development release towards this next updated open-source office suite release succeeding the big LibreOffice 6.0.

A new version of Collabora Online is now available, the web-based open-source office suite derived from the cloud version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 6.0 was released at the end of January while already is a fair amount of new features over the past two months that have started up building for the next release of this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 6.1.