LibreOffice 24.2 review - A pleasant surprise

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-29 14:00:04

In many ways, LibreOffice is the Linux of office suits. What do I mean by this? Well, some releases are good, some bad, there are often seemingly random regressions in between, and it never quite fully manages to become the ultimate replacement for Microsoft Office. On top of that, LibreOffice is dogmatic, and it sticks stubbornly to an ideology that, in the long run, actually causes more harm than good. My opinion, of course.

That said, I've been using it forever, I like it, it's my primary office suite, and I've written many a book using it. The problems almost always revolve around document format support, and the fact publishers and companies out there insist on Microsoft standards. This forces me to always make the very last revision to any one of my manuscripts in Word, even if the entirety of work is done in LibreOffice until that point. But I digress. I would like to review the new LibreOffice version, 24.2. A year-month naming convention, perhaps it spells an additional, fresh, much-needed change to the suite? Begin, we do.

My test box was a KDE neon system. I grabbed the latest version of the program suite, extracted it, and then install the 20-odd .deb files that came as part of the archive. Quick and easy job, no problems, so far. The one thing you will notice right away - new icons. They look fresh and exciting. Good.