LibreOffice Stories: Birthday, New Release (4.2), Web Site, TDF Board
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-11 14:19:04 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-11 14:19:04 UTC
-
All in all, this list would not significantly change the userbase of LibreOffice; but it would also position LibreOffice in places and circles where it’s not really used either, and I feel it’s a welcome set of suggestions that differ from the usual Android/iOS porting and cloud based office suite. On a deeper level, I think it also means that LibreOffice as a tool and office suites in general can change and grow to adapt to new usages even today.
-
Less than one month after the release of the major LibreOffice 4.2 update, LibreOffice 4.2.1 has been released to ship a large number of fixes for discovered problems.
-
The Document Foundation yesterday announced that the new Board of Directors is "officially in charge." These new members were recently elected and congratulated last December and have been in a sort of training since. In other news, TDF today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.2.1 for early adopters, an update to 4.2 released January 30.
-
There are a bunch of FLOSS office suites but two of them are the big dogs: LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. “October 29th, someone downloaded the 75,000,000th copy of Apache OpenOffice™. The 75 million downloads have occurred in the less than 18th months since the first release of Apache OpenOffice on May 8th, 2012.
-
LibreOffice has been pushing forward in its development recently with supporting OpenCL in its spreadsheet, gaining an OpenGL rendering back-end, and supporting other modern features and system capabilities for the open-source office suite. LibreOffice is also planning for its adoption of the C++11 programming language and even C++14 language features.
-
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.1.5 today, for all those running the 4.1 branch of code. In other news, a Pennsylvania high school has provided their students with Linux laptops and Lifehacker.com has outlined the top 10 uses for Linux. Also, www.networkworld.com has a slideshow of the 16 weirdest places running Linux and KDE was featured in hit movie Gravity.
-
On Thursday the Document Foundation released its newest stable branch, LibreOffice 4,2. Don’t let be misled by its number; if we weren’t on a strict time released scheduled alongside a clear number scheme without any nickname for each release, I would have called this one the 5,0. Yes, you read that right, the mighty Five. Why? Mostly for two big reasons.
-
Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation today announced the immediate availability of the next major stable build of the popular office suite. LibreOffice 4.2 "features a large number of performance and interoperability improvements targeted to users of all kinds, but particularly appealing for power and enterprise users."
-
The Document Foundation's newest release of LibreOffice 4.2 targets early adopters. It comes with many new performance and interoperability improvements for users of all kinds. Specifically, this update is designed to appeal to Windows power and enterprise users.
-
A new stable, major release of the open-source LibreOffice suite is now available and with it comes several new and improved features.
-
The initial work on an OpenGL rendering back-end has landed in LibreOffice, not too long after receiving OpenCL support for spreadsheets and OpenGL canvas support.
Pushed into Git today was the initial OpenGL rendering support, anti-aliasing support, a new time-based charting approach, OpenGL text rendering, OpenGL area rendering support, and other OpenGL-related changes.
Open source office suite alternatives are well able to handle multiple languages. Apache OpenOffice for example, already supports 32 languages, and the upcoming new version will add several new languages, including Danish and Norwegian, according to a press statement from the Apache Software Foundation, released on International Mother Language Day, Thursday 20 February. Multilingualism is also a feature of LibreOffice, another open source office suite, localised in over a hundred languages.
-
I bought a HiDPI laptop in October to replace my 5-year old Thinkpad. Between the 5.7 million pixels, and the bright LED backlight replacing my dying and dim CFL bulb, it makes the daily computing experience much easier on the eyes. I’d put up with a lot for this screen. It turns out I have to compared to my old Lenovo, as there is an incompatible and inferior keyboard layout, the Synaptics mouse drivers are flakey, it is difficult to replace the battery or hard drive, etc.
[...]
Apparently, everyone is so busy delivering a new product, fostering a young community, paying down technical debt, making it run on Android, improving import and export, rewriting the Calc engine, removing Java, etc., that no one has time to make it look good on these beautiful screens. There is a lot happening without any rich benefactor anymore, and a split community. If you think LibreOffice is amazing, just imagine what it would be if IBM gave them $10M / year, and the trademark, and didn’t seduce away naïve volunteers and donations. (I believe if IBM were to ask Watson whether it should end the fork, the AI would recommend it. Watson is only being applied to customer problems instead of their own. One could spend a lot of time correcting the inaccurate FUD written on the AOO dev alias. Imagine we lived in a society that celebrated divorce instead of marriage.)
-
When we first started the LibreOffice Project, we had a gazilion tasks to work on. Among them, we had priorities, most of them involving the code readiness of our first version, LibreOffice 3.3. Another priority was to make sure that the native-lang communities of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project would be able to find the tools needed to work on the releases, (re)create documentation, QA of their localized builds and several other important tasks. These were some of our most crucial priorities; yet among them, you would not have noted “design a nice website”.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- EPO Strike a Week From Now, After That Strikes Can Become Permanent
- A week from tomorrow there will be another strike
-
- Links 23/03/2026: "Shocking Peter Thiel Antichrist Lectures", Robert Mueller Remembered
- Links for the day
- The Scandal Bigger Than IBM/Red Hat Layoffs is the de Facto "Media Blackout" About Those Layoffs
- So we have a media crisis, aside from the economic crises
- Gemini Links 23/03/2026: Geminispace/Elpher Enhancement and the Cerberus Cinco
- Links for the day
- Fear is Not a Legitimate Factor
- Smart people know that trying to prevent moral people from doing the "Right Thing" will backfire
- Fuel Autonomy and What It Teaches Us About Software Autonomy (or Software Freedom)
- Need we wait until a "software Pearl Harbor" or protect ourselves proactively by weaning ourselves off of GAFAMware?
- Scheduled Maintenance This Coming Wednesday
- Other than that, all is the same and we carry on as usual
- Most Press Articles About IBM Are LLM Slop, Sometimes With Slop Images
- IBM basically laid off almost 1,000 people last week [...] At the moment about 75% of the 'articles' we see about IBM (in recent days) are some kind of slop
- Links 23/03/2026: Security Breaches, Energy Shortages, Another SRA Scandal, and Patents on Nature
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 22, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, March 22, 2026
- Streisand Effect and Justice
- This weekend this site has served over 8 million Web requests
- Gemini Links 22/03/2026: "Woman of Tomorrow" and "First Steps in Geminispace"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 19 Out of 200: They Were Ill-prepared for Tough Questions in Cross-Examination
- Very ill-prepared for the deteriorating situation caused by their clients' past behaviour towards many people, including high-profile figures who offered to testify
- The Media Sold Out to Slop Bros
- If you wish for the hype to stop, then stop participating in it
- The Only Non-IBM Staff in Fedora Council/Leadership Attacks Booting Freedom (Just Like the Master Wants)
- Last week IBM laid off almost 1,000 people in Confluent and the media didn't write anything about it, so don't expect anyone in what's left of the media to comment on Fedora's demise and silent layoffs at Red Hat
- Just Like a Founder of XBox Said, Microsoft XBox is Collapsing, Management Continue to Jump Ship
- Nowadays Microsoft tries to promote this idea that Windows is XBox and XBox is Windows
- Links 22/03/2026: Slop Triggers Emergency at Meta, Energy Prices Rise Sharply
- Links for the day
- Links 22/03/2026: Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' in Legal Trouble (Plagiarism, Distortion, Misrepresentation); Facebook/Meta Kills Off "Horizon Worlds"
- Links for the day
- Racism Dressed Up as "Choice"
- Racism is rampant at IBM
- Probably an All-Time Record
- Our investment in our own SSG is paying off
- Your Site Should Implement Its Own Search (Before It's Too Late)
- GAFAM was never trustworthy
- Gemini Links 22/03/2026: LLM Slop Attacks USENET, Announcing Pig (New Game in Gemini Protocol)
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 21, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, March 21, 2026
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 18 Out of 200: Third Parties Funding Attacks on the Messengers, Lawsuits Against GAFAM-Critical Voices That Uphold Real National Security
- Women are like kryptonite to them
- Never Trust People Who Write Their Own Wikipedia Pages (Vanity Pages About Themselves) or Ask Friends to Do So. Also: Jono Bacon is Married to Microsoft.
- We'd hardly be the first to point out Wikipedia isn't what it seems
- No Tolerance for Attacks on Family Members
- Being a Free software activist ought not lead to "collateral damage" like attacks on family members, including doxing
- Sirius Open Source is Just a Zombie Firm With Shell Entities
- Many companies fake their health and their size
- Communities Can Only Survive When Trust Prevails
- PCLinuxOS is still a vibrant and authentic community
- Techrights Was Always a Community Site
- The harder we're attacked, the more people participate in the site
- Maintenance Reminder
- We'll carry on publishing
- Behind the PR Smokescreen and Microsoft-Sponsored Chaff, Microsoft Layoffs in "AI" Alleged This Month
- In an age when ~1,000 simultaneous layoffs aren't enough to receive any media coverage, what can we expect remaining publishers to tell us about Microsoft layoffs in 2026?
- EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part VIII - Mobbing and Silencing of Dissenting Staff
- that's the very cornerstone of functional democracies with real opposition parties
- Bluewashing at Confluent: Some Workers to Leave Within 3 Months (IBM Mass Layoffs)
- Is the "era of AI" an era when none of the media will mention over 800 layoffs? [...] There's a lesson here about the state of the contemporary media, not just IBM and bluewashing
- Microsoft OpenAI, Drowning in Debt and Forced to Make Significant Cuts (as Reports Reveal This Month), Does Hiring Disguised as "Takeovers" to Fake Value or Alleged Potential
- Remember what happened to Skype last year
- Reader Shares Recent Memes on Slop and 'Coding' by LLMs
- "just some funny memes I thought were relevant to current coverage."
- Slop Does Not Replace Art, It Contaminates Everything With Reckless Nonsense
- many Computer Scientists do not want programs to get contaminated by slop
- Coders Don't Just Reject 'Vibe Coding' Because They're "Luddites", They Just Know the True Cost of Slop
- if some programmer says slop sucks, don't rush to assume selfishness or defence of one's occupation
- When Nobody Else Covers the News
- There's an obvious "media blackout" regarding the mass layoffs
- Links 21/03/2026: David Botstein Dies, Slop as Censorship Apparatus
- Links for the day
- Links 21/03/2026: Metastablecoin Fragmentation and Crescent Moon
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/03/2026: Historic Ada Docs; The Lurking LLM on the SmolNet
- Links for the day
- HSBC the Latest Failed Bank Using Slop as Excuse for Its Financial Failure
- "HSBC is planning on cutting as many as 20,000 jobs in the near future as the company allies with AI revolution."
- Invitation to General Assembly After 1,200 EPO Workers Participated in the Demonstration 3 Days Ago
- "the strike of 19 March was also very well followed."
- A/Prof Susan G Kleinmann, Enkelena Haxhija & Debian-private risk to MIT
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 20, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, March 20, 2026