LibreOffice 5 released with bug fixes, cloud and mobile aspirations

By Marc Guillot

LibreOffice, the non-Microsoft and (to many) beloved office suite, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 5. It’s of particular interest to Linux mavens, but the rest of LibreOffice users will benefit as well, thanks to an impressive boost in performance through GPU hardware and some interesting new features.

First up are new GTK 3 and Wayland ports, which lay the foundation for a strong future for native LibreOffice in new Linux distributions. Other more visible improvements are the ability to edit on Android, new support for the cloud, graphic accelerated rendering through OpenGL, graphic accelerated computing through OpenCL, improved spreadsheets, and a 64-bit version for Windows. (See the full release notes for more information.)

LibreOffice has yet to be updated in the Play Store, so we couldn’t test the new document editing functionality in Android. The project’s long-term goal is to create a system in which documents are linked through the cloud and ubiquitously available across any device platform. Michael Meeks presents this future in the video below.

Other Office suites, notably Microsoft’s, have made significant in-roads in this department, but LibreOffice wants to match or exceed their capabilities. To achieve this goal LibreOffice has been recoded as a reusable core in the LibreOfficeKit. This new core exposes all the functionality of LibreOffice through a very simple C/C++ library – header-only, with no linkings. The new Android, On-Line and LOConv (format conversions) clients have been build over this API and LibreOfficeKit.

Last month, AMD demonstrated the big improvements in performance we will find in LibreOffice thanks to the built-in hardware acceleration. Executing a

standard spreadsheet on a common APU (A10 7800B)

, they compared the time to run it on CPU with the time

to run it with OpenCL enabled, so the GPU in the AMD’s APU can do the heavy lifting in those calculations

. They used the US Geological Service’s Ground Water Daily test spreadsheet, which is based on a large real-world data set of ground water levels in the southeast.

Here’s the kicker: The time to run those calculations in the spreadsheet dropped from 2 minutes 21 seconds to a stunning ¼ second when hardware acceleration was

enabled. We’ve previously covered AMD’s efforts to integrate HSA with LibreOffice, but it’s still not clear how much of a focus this is for the team itself. The recent release notes for the software make no mention of HSA, AMD, or heterogeneous computing.

LibreOffice developers have also made a major effort of cleanup, translation, and fixing bugs. LibreOffice code has aggressively been moved to C++ 11, replacing deprecated language constructions, resulting in more manageable code. Of the 50,000 original German comments, only 5,000 remain untranslated in the current LibreOffice code. Finally, the number of relevant bugs has been reduced to virtually zero (or so it appears initially).

What do you think about LibreOffice 5? What features would you like to see in the future? Let us know in the comments.