LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

[Posted August 21, 2023 by jake]

The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 7.6 Community. It is the last release using the existing numbering scheme as the office suite will move to date-based release numbers starting with LibreOffice 24.2 in February, 2024. Highlights of this release include support for document themes, including import and export of them, a new navigation panel for Impress and Draw, zoom-gesture support, font-handling improvements, and lots more; the release notes have all the details.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community's new features have been developed by 148 contributors: 61% of code commits are from the 52 developers employed by three companies sitting in TDF's Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or other organizations, 15% are from 7 developers at The Document Foundation, and the remaining 24% are from 89 individual volunteers.
Other 202 volunteers – representing hundreds of other people providing translations – have committed localizations in 160 languages. LibreOffice 7.6 Community is released in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of those 120 languages as their second language (L2).

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 22, 2023 6:52 UTC (Tue) by dveeden (subscriber, #120424) [Link] (6 responses)

I thought that LibreOffice had replace Apache OpenOffice as the natural successor. However at FrOSCon in Germany I noticed that there were people promoting OpenOffice. Looks like OpenOffice is still going.

While office suites were important in the past to get desktop share for UNIX/Linux this doesn't seem to be the case anymore with things like Google Docs.

This also brings back many memories to SuSE Linux (6.x? 7.x?) with StarOffice bundled on the same CD's. And Corel WordPerfect 8.x for UNIX.

https://archive.org/details/wordperfect-8-for-linux-1999
https://archive.org/details/sun-staroffice-5.1

Funny enough there also was a LaTeX stand at FrOSCon and I'm probably more likely to use that again in the next few months than using LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 22, 2023 10:05 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

It is criminal that Apache continues to promote OpenOffice, which has had essentially no development in years except for some small bugfixes. For those aware of this, it diminishes the image of Apache. For those not aware, they get suckered into using an inferior and buggy office suite not knowing of a better alternative.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 22, 2023 13:13 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Yes. The OpenOffice fiasco has IMO really diminished the reputation of the Apache Foundation. It seems that pig-headedness wins over what's best for the community.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 22, 2023 21:02 UTC (Tue) by Tov (subscriber, #61080) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes. It is incredible that they are still actively promoting the (previously strong) brand "OpenOffice", without having done any serious development for many years. It is almost as if the Apache Software Foundation have some interest in obstructing LibreOffice from becoming a serious competitor to other commercial office suites out there....
https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsors

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 23, 2023 8:41 UTC (Wed) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149) [Link]

I wouldn't point the finger to the sponsoring companies. To me, it seems like Apache OpenOffice is Jim Jagielski's baby. He still shows up in the dev lists every once in a while and probably has a hard time to admit that what he has started to raise at Apache found a new home somewhere else.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 22, 2023 16:01 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

On the other hand, I am right now using LibreOffice (on Fedora) to deal with the documents and accounts of a very small association. Including stuff it might be borderline illegal for privacy reasons to stuff into some cloud. For such simple docs its compatibility with the MS formatted files the other people keep sending is good enough, and a lifesaver.

LibreOffice 7.6 Community released

Posted Aug 23, 2023 21:10 UTC (Wed) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link]

LaTeX might be a good option for someone who is composing their own documents and doesn't need to collaborate with non-technical (i.e., the vast majority of) users. But LibreOffice has gotten very good over the last few years, and its pace of improvement is truly impressive.