FOSS Week in Review
LibreOffice 5 Ready for Prime Time: LibreOffice, the office suite of choice of yours truly and others in the FOSS field, is now in the starting blocks to take on the proprietary office suites. The Document Foundation announced this week the release of LibreOffice 5.0, with a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, the latest LO release offers better interoperability with proprietary office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, with new and improved filters to handle non standard formats.
“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” said Michael Meeks, a director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.”
Along with the import and export filters, highlights include new icons and major improvements to menus and sidebar, an impressive number of new and enhanced spreadsheet features. A complete list of the most significant new features can be found here.
LibreOffice 5.0 is now available on The Document Foundation website, and no doubt it will soon to be appearing in a distro update near you.
Intel Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5: From the it’s-KDE4-all-over-again desk, Softpedia reported this week that users of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop — primarily those using Kubuntu 15.04 and OpenSUSE, though on other distributions running KDE as well — may be encountering crashes thanks to a bug outlined by KDE’s Martin Sandsmark on the KDE mailing list. The Softpedia article states that a bug in the Intel graphics stack crashes various OpenGL applications running atop the KDE Plasma 5 desktop, but there is a workaround for the problem which is outlined in both the article and in Sandsmark’s email to the KDE list. Hopefully this will just be a proverbial blip on the radar screen and the folks at KDE will put this behind them.
Yo Quiero Linux Certification Exam: The Linux Foundation announced this week its Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exams are available in Spanish and Portuguese. The Foundation also announced that the LFS201 course, Essentials of Linux System Administration, is also available in Portuguese. “The Linux Foundation continues to look for ways to expand access to quality Linux training for people all around the world, and the launch of certification exams and Essentials of System Administration in Spanish and Portuguese is the next logical step,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, in the announcement. “Brazil and Latin America are expected to add hundreds of thousands of IT jobs in the coming years, and this course will help enable anyone who wants to compete for one of those positions to do so.” Que fantastico, Linux Foundation, y muchissimas gracias!
Quick Takes: Like the Marines, Debian is looking for a few good coders. OK, they’re seeking many good coders to help with their new UEFI team, according to a blog post by Debian developer Steve Mcintyre. Check out the blog for details… Can’t get enough of systemd, or want to know more? Texas Linux Fest is the place to be, since Red Hat will be giving a session on it, among others, at the San Marcos event later this month… Ubuntu 15.10 Wile E. Coyote — er, sorry, Wily Werewolf — has shifted gears and will be based on version 4.2-rc5 of the Linux kernel and later manifestations thereof, according to the minutes of the latest Canonical Kernel Team meeting… Manjaro announced a new release this week as well, Manjaro-i3 0.8.13.1 for those of you keeping score at home, and you can take a look at the details and download it here.
See you Wednesday.
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Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
lol this is exactly what is wrong with open source things like libre office. nobody likes using microsoft word. word only exists because businesses still pay for it. no business in their right mind would drop the microsoft office suite for the libre office one.
no individual would voluntarily use microsoft word for their writing, much less an open source knockoff.
it’s silly. the entire tech industry has moved on. microsoft is desperately trying to remain relevant (with certain degrees of success, admittedly).
it is rather embarassing to see sites like this posting things about how great they are compared to microsoft products.
news flash: nobody gives a shit. a word processor is a word processor and it is boring and nobody cares. individuals have moved on to more tailored tools and businesses will never cancel their microsoft license for open/libre/derp-dujour/office that people come up with.
congrats, libre office 5 can finally compete with the market that existed 10 years ago.