LibreOffice 4.3 Released, KDE Naming, and Zorin Reasons
Today was quite the busy news day here in Linuxville and the top story must have been the release of LibreOffice 4.3. Seems it brought significant changes and got lots of coverage. SiliconIndia.com has a list of the top eight alternative operating systems and Bruce Byfield looks at KDE's continually confusing callings. We have 10 reasons to try Zorin OS and 10 easy steps to changing Manjaro back to Arch. Heartbleed is still reeking havoc and Tor issues an advisory. And even that's not all.
LibreOffice 4.3 topped the news today. The announcement says "you can't own a better office suite." I suppose that set the meme picked up by bloggers and writers such as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols who said, "The best open-source office suite gets better," and Robert Pogson who said, "LibreOffice 4.3 [is] The Almost Perfect Office Suite."
Some of the major features and changes include improved OOXML interoperability, more intuitive spreadsheet handling, new previews in Start Center, and 3D models in Impress. But the most interesting improvement is new support for really long paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters. I've never written a paragraph that long, so it's no wonder I didn't run into that 11 year old bug. Download your copy here.
Bruce Byfield yesterday tried to make sense out of KDE's confusing naming convention. Byfield reminds us that in 2009 "KDE announced a change in its branding. KDE would refer to the community and its common technology, KDE Plasma to the desktop, KDE Applications to the utilities and KDE-specific software, and KDE Software Compilation to the release of all together." He then says, "I wonder whether the current crop of names is more anti-branding rather than branding. That is, instead of clarifying the KDE brand, they may very well muddy it."
Siliconindia.com today published a list of the "8 Best Alternative Operating Systems You Can Install." When they start their list with Haiku and ReactOS you can see where it's going. Those and most others they mention would be hard to install and even harder to run for even seasoned fiddlers. But they did include OpenBSD, which is actually possible to run. See their full story for more.
In other news:
* Tor security advisory: "relay early" traffic confirmation attack
* Heartbleed Flaw Is Still a Risk, Report Finds
* 10 easy steps to convert Manjaro Linux installation back to native Arch Linux
* Linux will not become a gaming platform, it already is one
* New Linux Foundation Members Leverage Global Linux Growth
* Looking for a technology job? Learn as much as you can about open source