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
- The Brand 'Watsonx' is a Terrible Name for IBM 'Hey Hi' (Chatbots) Because Watson Agreed With Adolf Hitler
- Almost a century has passed and IBM still believes that selling "intelligence", chatbots in particular, should be done under the name "Watson"
- Digg's Latest Incarnation Already Failed, It's Infested With LLM Slop
- Many submissions go to slopfarms and some get summarised by slop
- Microsoft-Controlled Media With Embargo and Press Operatives
- This won't be the last example of media manipulation for narrative control or face-saving "damage control"
- EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part III - It's in His Eyes
- Workers are free to draw their own conclusions
-
- Our IRC 5-Year Anniversary (for Self-Hosted) is Fast Approaching
- A week from now it's March already
- Gemini Links 22/02/2026: Dream Job Gone and Slop in Taskwarrior
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 21, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, February 21, 2026
- GNU/Linux Grew a Lot in Nicaragua
- We've not noticed until today
- Techrights Has Over 1,000 Good Articles 'in the Tank'
- Drafts, notes, and lengthy documents
- New Article Challenges Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for Choosing the Wrong SLAPP Cases to Investigate
- The one point we can agree on is that SRA does not know how to correctly select the worst culprits/offenders
- Why IBM is Still Scary and Dangerous
- Keep a distance from "Big Blue" Bully
- Measuring the Growth of Our Mission and Community
- Something between experiment and prototype
- Richard Stallman in the United States - Part III - Georgia Tech Did a Fine Job Upholding Free Speech Principles
- The real problem was social control media (toxic)
- Debian's Master is Deleting Criticism of SystemD and Other Things (On-Topic and Published by Debian Developers), Resorts to the Excuse Messages Are "Too Long"
- Censorship serves nobody except the masters that control this censorship
- Gemini Links 21/02/2026: Veganism and DeskPi RackMate T0
- Links for the day
- On The Web, XBox Already a Dying Breed
- Down to about 0.05% on large machines, based on statCounter [...] Microsoft will never publicly admit or say how many billions it lost on the XBox
- 2026 a Year of 'Top-Down' Microsoft Layoffs (Management First)
- Stay tuned for what comes next
- Your "Likes" Aren't Yours and They're Mostly "Worthless Clicks"
- Social hermits are not popular, irrespective of how many "Facebook friends" or "likes" they get
- Waggener Edstrom/Frank Shaw Lied, There Are Definitely Microsoft Layoffs
- Microsoft never issued a formal statement, it made allusions by proxy
- Slop Hype Makes Our Core Technology Less Reliable and Far Less Resilient (We Pay for the Catastrophe That Follows)
- Only slop-free projects can be trusted
- Going for 1,000 (Days of Uptime)
- universal records are vastly better
- Firefox is No-Go in China, Not Even 1% "Market Share" Anymore
- Given Mozilla's utterly rubbish marketing these days (politics over technical aspects), set aside the cheerleading for slop, there's hardly a chance of Mozilla Firefox reaching or exceeding 10% again
- Links 21/02/2026: Tensions Over Iran and Illegal Cheeto Tariffs, Presidential Approval Sags
- Links for the day
- Links 21/02/2026: "Moving Away From Cloudflare", Many Layoffs or Shutdowns in Games (Including XBox/Microsoft)
- Links for the day
- GNU Linux-libre is a Grown-Up Today
- "before that, every distro that wanted to respect its users' freedom had to remove itself all of the binary blobs that were distributed as part of the kernel Linux's so-called sources"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 20, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, February 20, 2026
- Gemini Links 21/02/2026: "The Evil of Action" and Slop Bots Causing Great Harm Online (Not Just the Web)
- Links for the day
- Like a Shell
- Overreactions can backfire
- Not Only Leaders of XBox Got Sacked (Layoffs)
- Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond got laid off
- 9PM on a Friday Night: Microsoft Says the Layoffs Are Not Layoffs
- We've said for a long time that XBox is doomed this year
- Gemini Links 20/02/2026: Misfin Server and Magic in Programming
- Links for the day
- Former Debian Project Leader Branden Robinson Cautions Against Cover-up and Censorship in Debian
- Debian drama. Again.
- analytics.usa.gov Reckons Windows "Market Share" Fell to Just 38%, Vista 11 Not Even a Third of Windows Users
- This coming summer Vista 11 turns 5
- The New Digg.com is Slop
- Slop "summaries" and Serial Sloppers are drowning out the site with fake 'articles' (plagiarism)
- Linus Torvalds: Bill Epsteingate Good Enough for Me to Wine and Dine With
- Torvalds is more connected to Jeffrey Epstein than Richard Stallman ever was
- Our Uptimes Are Always Better Than Any Site That Uses Clownflare
- Clownflare as a company operates like a cult
- GNU/Linux Apparently Rose to 6% in Uzbekistan
- If accurate, this represents a new problem for Microsoft and a big win for Software Freedom
- Sponsored Videos and 'Articles' in The Register MS, Stenography as a Service/Product
- They should more accurately label these actors
- It's Friday Again and Many People Leave IBM for Good (IBM Should be Reported for Illegal NDAs That Hide Layoffs)
- we very seldom see anyone deviating a lot from the "template-like" narrative, let alone mentioning "layoffs" or "RA" or some other term that implies non-consensual departure
- The Little Clique of Sloppers/Spammers About "Linux" Got Even Smaller
- Thankfully there are still genuine and legit GNU/Linux sites out there
- Links 20/02/2026: Microsoft Intentionally Kills Older Hardware, "The Story of XBox" Shows How Defective Microsoft Hardware Really Was
- Links for the day
- Turkmenistan One of Many Countries Where Microsoft Fell to Distant Third in Search
- We expect many layoffs in Bing some time soon
- Don't Wait for "Red Hat Layoffs" Because After Bluewashing They're IBM RAs and Don't Wait for "IBM Layoffs" Because They're Perpetual
- IBM layoffs are silent and "forever" (small trickle that never ends and is widespread - after all IBM is a very global and ubiquitous firm)
- Links 20/02/2026: Standards, Science, and Politics
- Links for the day
- What Do People Ever Buy From Microsoft Anyway (Not PCs)?
- Microsoft sells two things these days: 1) vapourware/promises. 2) its stock.
- Gemini Links 20/02/2026: "Mainstream Unix, Underground Unix", Slop Staging DDoS Attacks Against Small Sites
- Links for the day
- IBM Inclusivity: Red Hat Summit is for Rich Sponsors Like Microsoft and Rich Guests Who Pay $500 a Day
- Nothing signals societal tolerance more than paying a large military contractor
- GNU/Linux Adoption is Higher in Richer Countries
- Is it because freedom is actually expensive - something that only privileged people can pursue?
- Links 20/02/2026: Windows TCO Versus Deutsche Bahn, Europe Seeks More Independent Digital Future
- Links for the day
- IBM, Red Hat and Fedora: Don't Say "Master", It Offends People. Also IBM, Red Hat and Fedora: "Master Podman".
- The hypocrisy at Red Hat and Fedora shows no boundaries
- IBM Layoffs Aren't Just in IBM 'Proper'
- Who is still using Lotus after the HCL move?
- The Register MS Gets Paid by Gartner to Promote a Ponzi Scheme for Gartner, Microsoft, and Others
- The credibility of that site will suffer because it tries to sell a major scam to its audience
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 19, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, February 19, 2026