News LibreOffice gets overhaul for 4.4.0 release

I've never tried this, is it any better than open office ?

 

Excellent I will download a copy and see how it goes, thanks Gareth.

 

How about posting some screenshots?

I hope they didn't **** up the UI with ribbons and flat crap, the UI was the major reason for me to stick with LibreOffice instead of joining the M$ zombie horde.

 

Great news. I'll replace Windows with Arch linux in a few days, will give Libre Office a try.

 

openoffice is no longer being developed and libreoffice picked up where they left off using their code.
there is no reason to use openoffice over libreoffice.

 

I didn't know that, I knew Apache took over from whoever was developing it before but didn't realise it had now stopped completely. Anyway I installed Libreoffice earlier and it seems good so Openoffice went bye bye.

 

The demise of OpenOffice is really ironic. Oracle donated it to the Apache foundation and was relicensed under the Apache License. Because LibreOffice is licensed under MPL/LGPL, it means that it can take Apache Licensed code into the project. However, the opposite is not true. This means that improvements made to OpenOffice can be (and have been) imported to LibreOffice, but OpenOffice cannot import any code from LibreOffice. Thus OpenOffice, nowadays, is not only redundant, it is pointless.

That being said, the project isn't dead, just really slow.

 

This is one of my great frustrations about software.

Just because O is no longer being developed does not mean that it suddenly stopped working. It's an office suite using open source file formats, FFS! It works fine! I use it almost daily. Just because there probably won't be a new version released doesn't mean that it is any less useful now than it was while in active development. Unless some new and totally incompatible way to save a text document comes out, it will still work just fine in 10 years.

I may try LO, but I doubt that it will have enough improvements for to justify switching from O, even if the latter is officially dead.

 

In my opinion, your rationale only applies to commercial software. Since there's a payment involved, updating comes at a last resort for me, as I don't want to spend the money.
When it comes to free software, it is always worth to upgrade (unless you run into compatibility problems or the latest version is not considered stable), because it is free.

Then you should really try it, because there is significant difference in performance and functionality, for the better.
However, if you want absolute stability, you can use LO 4.3.5 instead. When it reaches the end of life (in May 2015), upgrade to the latest legacy branch. At that time, it should be 4.4.4.
However, this doesn't mean that LO 4.4.0 isn't stable enough for production at the moment.

 

LOL thanks ;-)

It looks OK, apart from the odd color combination in the menus (is this theme-dependent or is it fixed) ? Time to upgrade I guess ...

 

Nah the orange/brown is [imo] god-awful default theme for Ubuntu

This is what it looks like on windows -