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LibreOffice, the non-Microsoft and (to many) dearest part suite, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 5. It's of detail interest to Linux mavens, but the rest of LibreOffice users will do good besides, thank you to an impressive boost in functioning through GPU hardware and some interesting new features.

First upwards are new GTK 3 and Wayland ports, which lay the foundation for a strong future for native LibreOffice in new Linux distributions. Other more than 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 total release notes for more than information.)

LibreOffice has nevertheless to be updated in the Play Store, and so we couldn't exam the new certificate editing functionality in Android. The project'due south long-term goal is to create a organisation 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'southward, have fabricated 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-but, with no linkings. The new Android, On-Line and LOConv (format conversions) clients accept been build over this API and LibreOfficeKit.

LibreOffice

L ast month, AMD demonstrated the big improvements in performance we will discover in LibreOffice thank you to the congenital-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 information technology with OpenCL enabled, and so the GPU in the AMD's APU can do the heavy lifting in those calculations. They used the U.s.a. Geological Service'southward Ground Water Daily test spreadsheet, which is based on a large real-world information prepare of ground water levels in the southeast.

Here'due south 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'southward efforts to integrate HSA with LibreOffice, but information technology's still not articulate how much of a focus this is for the squad itself. The recent release notes for the software brand no mention of HSA, AMD, or heterogeneous computing.

LibreOffice GPU AMD

LibreOffice developers have also fabricated 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 cipher (or and then it appears initially).

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What do y'all call back virtually LibreOffice 5? What features would you like to run into in the future? Permit united states of america know in the comments.