LibreOffice 4.0 tested
Happy Birthday

LibreOffice celebrates its birthday with the release of the first version with a 4 in front of the dot. All modules offer substantial improvements and the kinds of changes that warrant a major version. We look at some features worth celebrating.
In early February, the LibreOffice developers released version 4.0 of the free office package [1]. As early as this year's Fosdem, users who visited the LibreOffice booth or the various keynotes got a pre-release peek at the new functions and features. The office suite's increase in speed is the result of a thorough source code cleanup. How this works in a major project was the subject of a Fosdem 2013 talk by Michael Meeks [2].
In the meantime, the project has released the first improved and bug-fixed version 4.0.1. I installed version 4.0.1 from March 5, 2013, on two lab machines running Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). To do this, I first followed the recommendation and removed the version of the office suite provided with the distribution and then manually installed the LibreOffice packages.
Preparations for the Party
The developers ditched some of the legacy Java ballast and implemented the fax and letter wizard in Python. They replaced their own search model with a faster and smaller one for regular expressions by ICU (International Components for Unicode) [3]. ODS, XLSX, and RTF documents now load faster, particularly presentations that contain slides with many catch lines.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
TUXEDO has unveiled a new InfinityBook Pro with an AMD Ryzen AI 300
This new notebook offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
Is This the Year of Linux?
Another major organization has decided to kick Windows and Office to the curb, in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.