LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

[Posted May 30, 2012 by corbet]

From:		"Italo Vignoli" <italo-AT-libreoffice.it>
To:		<lwn-AT-lwn.net>
Subject:		The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.4
Date:		Wed, 30 May 2012 13:09:07 +0200
Message-ID:		<caca7e910382561701998d8a0018a085@libreoffice.it>
Archive-link:		Article


Up to 100% performance improvements thanks to the efforts of a diverse and
growing developer and QA community

Berlin, May 30, 2012 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.4,
the fifth version of the free office suite's 3.5 family.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 offers significant performance improvements over the
previous versions of the product, which are the combined result of the many
code optimizations executed during the last months and the bug and
regression chasing activity performed regularly by volunteers and
developers. As a result, LibreOffice 3.5.4 is the fastest version of the
best free office suite ever, with up to 100% performance gains when opening
large files (depending on operating system, hardware configuration and file
contents).

The Document Foundation suggests all users to upgrade from previous
versions to LibreOffice 3.5.4.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 is available for immediate download from the following
link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

Change logs are available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.4/RC1
and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.4/RC2.

Short link to The Document Foundation blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-hz

The worldwide LibreOffice Conference will take place in Berlin, Germany,
from October 17th to 19th, 2012. Details on the program and a call for
papers will be available soon at http://conference.libreoffice.org.

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing,
meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by
the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the
culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate
and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office
suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and
contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation,
e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other
contributors in the community. As of March 15, 2012, TDF has over 140
members and well over a thousand volunteers and contributors worldwide.

Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1) 
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org - Skype: floeff
Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1) 
E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Eliane Domingos de Sousa (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3) 
E-mail: elianedomingos@documentfoundation.org - Skype: elianedomingos
Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1) 
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org - Skype: italovignoli 
GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

Full contact details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/ 
TDF legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint

(Log in to post comments)

Posted May 30, 2012 21:16 UTC (Wed) by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250) [Link]

So a 100% performance gain would mean that large files open before I've finished clicking the icon in my file navigator? Nice.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 30, 2012 21:37 UTC (Wed) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]

Beat me to it. 100% - 100% = 0. Actually not the best advertisement. Maybe they mean the previous version was 100% slower than the newer one.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 31, 2012 1:18 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Depends on whether seconds is the numerator or the denominator. It seems plausible to assume they meant 100%+100%=200%, and now you can open 12 documents/second instead of 6.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 30, 2012 23:25 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (guest, #60784) [Link]

Why would you imagine "100% performance gain" to mean (or be intended to mean) anything other than "does this activity twice as fast as it used to"?

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 31, 2012 10:07 UTC (Thu) by SEMW (subscriber, #52697) [Link]

Not the GP, but: because, while 100% (or greater) performance difference is indeed unambiguous (assuming a delay hasn't been eliminated entirely), anything *less* than 100% isn't.

For small percentages, the two meanings of "X% performance gain" are more-or-less the same: "the task takes 5% less time than it used to" and "You can do 5% more tasks in the same time" correspond to more or less the same improvement (multiplying by 1-X is about the same as dividing by X+1 for X << 1). But as the percentage gets higher, the approximation gets worse: e.g. "the task takes 33% less time than it used to" corresponds to "You can do 50% more tasks in the same time".

Generally, we seem to have standardised on the first of those, and understand "X% performance difference" to mean something takes X% less time than it used to - hence all the comments on here.

So letting people use "100% performance gain" as meaning "You can do 100% more things in the same time" *isn't* harmless even if in that particular situation it's unambiguous, because it gets people used to using that second meaning of "X% performance difference" as well as the (more standard) first.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 30, 2012 23:34 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Yeah, it's a feature called brainreadahead ;-)

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 31, 2012 4:57 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

You joke, but some systems actually do have forms of predictive readahead that come close. For instance, fetching and pre-caching content that you hover your mouse over, so that it loads instantly when you actually click it.

LibreOffice 3.5.4 released

Posted May 31, 2012 0:40 UTC (Thu) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link]

Heh. Reminds me of when my brother (who only used his bike for commuting) went to a bike shop and they were trying to sell him on harder, thinner tires to replace his fat slow mountain bike tires. He replaced his rear tire and told me "they said it'd cut 5 minutes off my commute- a little implausible since my commute is 8 minutes." I said "you should have replaced your front tire as well, so you could arrive before you leave."

best free office suite ever

Posted May 30, 2012 23:39 UTC (Wed) by aristedes (guest, #35729) [Link]

> best free office suite ever

This comment makes it seem that they only perceive their competition to be OpenOffice. Why are they so bitter about that fork after all this time? Shouldn't they be going after greater goals like just "best office suite ever" instead of setting their targets so narrowly on friendly people on the same side of the open source wall?

LibreOffice have been very successful in creating PR stories (here we have a report on just a minor bug fix release with no new features, which improves opening an average document from 2 seconds to 1 second). But it would be nice to see them aiming their public relations at MS Office, rather than people with congruent goals of producing an open source office suite.

best free office suite ever

Posted May 31, 2012 5:09 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

(here we have a report on just a minor bug fix release with no new features, which improves opening an average document from 2 seconds to 1 second).

But that actually is an improvement worth shouting about in the context of the LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org programs! Slowness has always been one of their worst flaws.

best free office suite ever

Posted May 31, 2012 7:32 UTC (Thu) by MKesper (guest, #38539) [Link]

Why are they so bitter about that fork after all this time?

My perception is that the people still sticking to the OpenOffice.org project are bitter about this fork and all others rather cheerful.

Oh, and did you ever open a document with OOo/LO on a netbook?

best free office suite ever

Posted May 31, 2012 10:45 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

> Oh, and did you ever open a document with OOo/LO on a netbook?

I used to do all my presentations on an eee 701 and then an eee 901 using OOo (ubuntu). It was fine, although the screen on the 701 was a bit small.

best free office suite ever

Posted May 31, 2012 12:56 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]

The stock OOo in Ubuntu is/was Go-OO[1], which was the pre-Oracle bought sun fork which later became LibreOffice. So if you used the OOo that came with basically any Linux distro, it was go-oo.

[1] http://go-oo.org/

best free office suite ever

Posted May 31, 2012 12:35 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

LibreOffice has done some tremendous work on a gigantic code base. If there are better or more professional ways of doing PR I'm sure there are ways of helping them.