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LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: LibreOffice 5.2 is finally here, after it has been in development for the past four months, during which the development team behind one of the best free office suites have managed to implement dozens of new features and improvements to most of the application's components. Key features include more UI refinements to make it flexible for anyone, standards-based document classification, forecasting functions in Calc, the spreadsheet editor, as well as lots of Writer and Impress enhancements. A series of videos are provided to see what landed in the LibreOffice 5.2 office suite, which is now available for download for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
"It works just as well as anything else".
That just about sums it up. How much more can you cram into a digital typewriter that 99% of the population needs?
Base is the least "loved" part of the suite, programmers seem to end up using an independent SQL database, and most users end up on a spreadsheet, for better or for worse. This is more the case nowadays as home versions of MS Office lack Access. This is not to say they are not trying but at the moment the most of the Base work is going on swapping out the old Java based database engine for a better one (http://firebirdsql.org/) this is not quite finished yet, although at the current rate I would expect it in 5.3.
Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
Just tested: 1 second for LibreOffice Writer cold (ie first time opened since turning on laptop). Hardware: Macbook Retine Pro 13"; Software: Ubuntu Gnome with LibreOffice 5.1.4.2 installed directly from repositories. Subsequent starts of LibreOffice are effectively instantaneous.
Based on experience with my rather more powerful work laptop, that's considerably faster than MS Office.
What are you on about? Two months? Closer to two years! LO started in 2010. OpenOffice was, as far as anyone could tell, a dead project at that time. The LO folks spent a full year cleaning up the code before making their initial release in early 2011. It was half a year later that Oracle finally (after a year and a half!) announced they'd be relicensing the old OOo code and donating to Apache. What was LO supposed to do? Stop everything and wait to see if this promised code drop (of code they'd already spent a year cleaning up, and another six months improving and adding features to) actually happened, and start over from scratch? That would be dumb!
Now, for a while there, things might have gone in all sorts of different ways. I installed both, and was happy to go with whichever one turned out the best. But AOO completely failed to attract developers. They had some strong support from IBM for a while, but IBM seems to have abandoned them at this point. They're down to a tiny handful of developers, and they currently have a major security bug (CVE 2016-1513), and they can't even figure out how to get updates to their users, even though they have a patch!
I've got no skin in the game. I like Apache too. Have several friends who are members of the Foundation. But it's clear to me at this point that LO has won, and AOO is a dead project walking. AOO has about a dozen people who have contributed in the last year. LO has hundreds. LO has more changesets accepted per day than AOO has in months! LO has backing from several major companies, most notably RedHat and Collabora. AOO lost their only corporate sponsor, IBM, over a year ago.
You use what you want to. AOO is gone from my system, and I don't miss it at all. Being supported by Apache doesn't mean much if you haven't got any developers, and can't even figure out how to get a security fix out to your users!
How about significantly better UI usability? It looks more aesthetically pleasing? It produces better, and more professional looking documents out of the box? It integrates more seamlessly with document management systems? It integrates better with actual ERP style information systems? It has more collaborative editing features?
The list goes on, but the thing is: Office has not been handled by Microsoft for the last 10+ years as an application. It's a platform. LO has been handled as stand-alone application. When you take it to an environment where it would have to work together with others, LO simply does not have the features.
At work we are building an ERP using add-ins: http://dev.office.com/docs/add-ins/overview/office-add-ins
They are basically an ability to slap HTML5 applications inside Word, typically on a side pane. The application gets special javascript API collection that gives it (limited, for security reasons) access to the data on the Word document. And that's not just the visible, but also structured metadata. So, a user can select some data to be produced on the document, and the app makes sure at the same time that the information system gets the same data, data can be refreshed and pulled over the network constantly, etc. On top of that, it is extremely usable for users. Basically the systems with their own views disappear from the user completely, when you can build context sensitive display inside applications that users already know how to operate...
LibreOffice really is not even IN THE COMPETITION in the corporate settings. It does not basically exist as an option.