This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Lots of love for LibreOffice.
Its a great opensource project that just keeps chugging along being great.
My team and I use it exclusively in our consultancy. Complex documents and spreadsheets all day long. LO never gets tired.
Without LO id be beholden to Microsoft.
Apache should really release the rights to the name OpenOffice and let LO have it.
Is dark mode no longer busted?
I guess I'll find out.
Do you mean this issue?
I had this for a while and took a bit of searching to find this simple fix
No, not that one. But I guess there are multiple angles, dark mode overall has been pretty rough.
The one that gets in my way the most is their already spotty xlsx conversion seems to parse Office's default font color as black instead of automatic, which means when you open Excel docs on LibreOffice you get black text on black background by default.
You can just select all and manually change the text color, but it's a pain, and on spreadsheets you have to do it on each spreadsheet page. From what I've seen there have been bugs opened and reclosed with "you should set the text to automatic", which is engineer excuses for what is obviously a genuine issue with the defaults of document conversion, as far as I can tell.
On Debian you can fix this by installing libreoffice-gtk3
Those of us on Debian (stable) won't see this update for 2 years. Haha.
Does it still look like it's from 1998?
It works very well for my light personal needs, but I find the UI to be an eyesore...
There's an optional "tabbed interface" in View > User Interface that's a lot like the Office ribbon. Like the Office ribbon, it has context-sensitive additional tabs, and you can enable a compact version that shows less but takes up less vertical space.
I've not had a need for LibreOffice for a while, but it certainly looks a lot less cluttered than the default old-school toolbars.
That looks great
It has a proper dark mode now. Also there's different icon themes, I like the Breezy theme. Makes it look early 2010s
I like the 1998 version.
If it was good enough for my parents, it’s good enough for me!
To be fair, they've had the option to switch to that unusable ribbon thing Microsoft switched to for a while now.
Thankfully, it's not the default.
The ribbon UI sure is shit.
LO has a command palette which is handy when looking for obscure functions. Shift esc.
The notes include "improved user interface", so I'm sure whatever issues you have had for years are fixed by that 😅
Would you prefer something Microsoft has cooked up recently?
Ah yes, the only 2 design options. 1998 or Microsoft.
I mean… Corel still looks the same too…
Looks like 98 SE now!
I find the title kinda funny; it's August 2025 and we're proud of it 😎
honestly kinda disappointed they switched to calendar versioning, it makes identifying big releases much harder
GNU IMP (i refuse to say the short name) 3.0.0 was such an event, it’s sad knowing libreoffice can’t really have that
Wait, is the G in GNU pronounced like the G in GIMP?!?!?
idk, but the G in GIMP (ugh) does stand for GNU
i wonder if it’s also the official reason that it’s (typically) pronounced in GNOME?
I know. I just didn't know GNU was pronounced Gee-Noo, like in GIMP
Isn't GNOME also a GNU thing? GNU Image Manipulation Program Network O… Object… Model… uhh… Environment? Also, this means GNOME is pronounced like Genome, as in, like, Jeans and stuff, innit?
…do you pronounce GIMP with a soft G?
for all 3 of these projects the main way ive heard them said is with a hard G, i know there is a debate with GNOME as to pronounce the G or not (as in the word "gnome"), idk if a similar debate exists with GNU
imo, there’s no wrong way to pronounce a word, as long as people know what you’re talking about, it’s fine
Dammit. I want arguments. Chaos. But yes, I do soft G GIMP. Not GNU or GNOME. I do say GNOME with a G, though. I mean, I don't talk about these things IRL. These words don't show up in my convos. Actually, it might be without a G. I guess I could start soft G'ing GNU and GNOME, just because. It's how I got to soft G GIF, by going the opposite way I was doing. And now it just be like that, and hard G GIF feels kinda weird.
Do they have a PDF editor solution?
Firefox lets you open and edit pdfs
LibreOffice Draw can actually edit PDFs - it's not perfect for complex layouts but works great for basic editing, adding text, and modifing simple elements (tho sometimes formatting gets a bit wonky).
Maybe i got lucky, but i always had good experiences with the pdfs i had to tweak in draw
But most of my modofications are kind of form-filling, alignment font and format was never a reequirement
