After sitting the first few months out, I decided to jump in and try LibreOffice. I failed to report back in September that OpenOffice was forked and more or less taken out of the custody of Oracle (no comments there), where it was re-branded and placed under care of The Document Foundation. At that point it saw the beginning of a LONG series of ongoing improvements to make it a truly excellent word processor/office suite option.
And here we are: it’s all ready the new year. I’ve been following the progress of the project over the past few months, and have seen an impressive amount of performance-related bugs fixed. That being said, I never felt the time to switch was exactly right until now. A few days ago OMG! Ubuntu! reported that there was now an official PPA. So, I fired up the terminal and went to work. To save you time, I’ll post the commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libreoffice
sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome
Note for Kubuntu users: you can substitute ‘libreoffice-gnome’ for ‘libreoffice-kde’
IMPORTANT NOTE: Installing LibreOffice via PPA uninstalls OpenOffice.org
I launched LibreOffice Writer, and my first impression was that the new splash screen made me very optimistic of the future of the project. It is simple, elegant, and refined:
Sadly, in terms of the interface, that’s the highlight for the moment. While some of the icons are different and there are slight differences in UI, it’s nothing that we’ve been hoping for. The improvements thus far have been in performance (and I must say, it’s noticeable. It launches much quicker than before), not interface. As I said, though, the splash makes me optimistic. If they’ve done this well in
design so far, I know they can continue to make it an impressive product. Make it work well, then make it pretty. If I remember right, there’s even talk about adding a “ribbon” interface in the future, similar to the one introduced in Microsoft Office 2007.
One of my only other gripes is that it fails to integrate into gnome2-globalmenu. I would be more forgiving if it weren’t for the fact that we have to install a gnome-specific package!
That being said, for all the places that it’s unimpressive, it’s quite a remarkable step. I mean, it’s only been a few months, and yet it’s made leaps and bounds over the old junk we’ve used for years. I’m very satisfied with the progress. At this point, I would only recommend installing if you want to keep up with each little update. While doing so wouldn’t be harmful or decrease stability, it wouldn’t be that beneficial for most users.
And on one final congratulatory note: LibreOffice has now officially replaced OpenOffice on daily builds of Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’.
TL;DR: It’s come a long way, it’s got a long way to go.