LibreOffice Has Found its Rhythm

This week, Susan covered The Document Foundation's release of the latest version of the LibreOffice open source office productivity suite. The release announcement claims that the suite offers as much as 100 percent better performance than previous versions, and some early reports from users are confirming that. Meanwhile, there are strong signs that the Linux community is embracing LibreOffice, and that Windows users make up the majority of new downloads for Apache OpenOffice.

Oracle handed OpenOffice off to the Apache Software Foundation last summer, leaving it a community-based project. However, everyone wondered what would be the result concerning The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice fork. Now, there is every sign that LibreOffice is scoring big successes with users.  "LibreOffice 3.5.4 is the fastest version of the best free office suite ever, with up to 100% performance gains when opening large files (depending on operating system, hardware configuration and file contents)," said this week's release announcement.

Now, stories are appearing asking whether anyone really cares about OpenOffice anymore.  Network World takes note of online comments from Linux users confirming that they overwhelmingly favor LibreOffice. The article also notes that downloaders of OpenOffice are primarily Windows users:

"Nearly 9 out of 10 downloads of the new version of OpenOffice have been for Windows machines, rather than Linux, according to recently released statistics from Apache...Of the first 1,000,663 Sourceforge downloads of OpenOffice 3.4, 87% were Windows users, 11% were running Mac OS, and just 2% were on Linux, the [Apache] team said."

Anecdotally, all of this matches up with comments left by OStatic readers, where users on Linux seem to be embracing LibreOffice. You can find out more about the latest release of the suite here, and more on Apache OpenOffice is available here.