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Blogger Dedoimedo is known for his fascination with bling and his attention to compatibility with MICROS~1's pseudo-standards. So, how did the most recent version of the popular FOSS office suite fare in his test?
LibreOffice 4.4 review - Finally, it rocks
[...]As a free, open-source and cross-platform solution, LibreOffice allows people to enjoy the world of writing, spreadsheets, presentations, and [the like] without having to spend hefty sums of money. The only problem till now was that it didn't quite work as advertised. Microsoft Office support was, for the lack of a better word, lacking.
[...] The most important part, [it now has] Microsoft Office support
[...]my 182-page [DOCX] document, full of images, references, footnotes, preformatted code, and other cool elements, all of which were initially conceived in LaTeX then transformed to PDF and finally to DOCX looked pretty much spotless. The image quality was a little low, but it has nothing to do with LibreOffice. I was amazed. I had not expected this, and it seems for the first time ever, LibreOffice is a most viable solution for home office use. Blimey.
LibreOffice 4.4 is everything you could have hoped for, and then some. It's beautiful. It's streamlined. It has an improved UI, which offers much more intuitive work flows, resulting in an immediate boost in productivity. It comes with enhanced menus, a more intelligent way of working with styles, easier graphics, copy & paste options, a simpler method of polishing up presentations. Most importantly, it offers a genuinely good support for the proprietary Microsoft file formats, allowing you, for the very first time, to consider LibreOffice as the one and only office suite you'll ever need.
I have never quite expected this. In fact, LibreOffice 4.4 should have been called 5.0, because it is that much better. Perhaps grander changes are needed to justify a full new release. Just think of the possibilities, if we got all this in a single dot revision. Imagine what will happen when LibreOffice finally matures toward the next large release.
One wonders how long it will be till MSFT alters their "standard" so that compatibility is broken again.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by captain normal on Tuesday February 24 2015, @06:49PM
Does it still take .5 to one minute to load the program?
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 4, Insightful) by warcques on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:17PM
Get a dang SSD and half decent processor and you're working in 3 seconds...
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:23PM
Yes it sure does if you use a Pentium I with the division bug to do it...
(also, which program, it's a fucking suite)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:30PM
Depends on what you're using for a computer I suppose.
If you use it a lot, there is a quick start option that lets it run a small quick-starter in memory. If you don't use it a lot it hardly matters if it takes a minute.
On my quad core it took a 6-count to load from a new install.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @10:12PM
Those folks who have a need to emulate the startup tricks that MICROS~1 uses have had this since forever:
The preload app [google.com]
...or, as mechanicjay says below, start the app once and you're golden after that.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:43AM
..or, as mechanicjay says below, start the app once and you're golden after that.
No, you're not.
Cache works on a least-recently-used purging scheme, so unless you are loading and exiting the
application frequently, cache will be purged.
Unless you have some significant portion pre-running you have to wait for disk-load time, and its a
pretty big bundle of DLLs.
Also, bear in mind that microsoft didn't invent the technique of keeping apps running to save load time.
Every web server and mail server has hot running processes waiting in memory. The slowest thing
in the computer is disk access, and if you have to write dirty cache pages back before you can load a big program hot running processes are the way to go.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:37PM
I just updated my core2 duo laptop with a cheezy-ass hard drive. It took 7 seconds to be at a usable writer screen. I closed writer, the files now being in the fs-cache, I was able to open writer in 2 sec and calc in 3. This feels markedly faster than 4.3 loaded on my yesterday. Admittedly, I forgot to take timings before the upgrade.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Tuesday February 24 2015, @08:36PM
I'm running it on a 2 year old computer with an SSD drive. The application loads so fast that I don't even have time to move to a different part of the screen before my document is loaded. Call it 1 second until the application as document are loaded. Maybe two seconds if it's a complex spreadsheet.
SSDs are ridiculously fast.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:20AM
shill much?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hash14 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:26AM
I opened writer in 5 seconds on this:
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:27AM
Also note that I used a regular mechanical HDD, no SSD
(Score: 4, Informative) by gman003 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:30AM
Well, let's settle this like scientists. Experiment: open each program in LibreOffice, to the most recently-opened file on my laptop. Still on an ancient 3.5 version, as it happens. Program is stored on an SSD (a rather old one, a 120GB Crucial M3), data files are stored on a hard drive (750GB 7200RPM laptop drive, a Seagate if I recall correctly). Confirmed before, between runs, and after, that there was no background process hiding. It was a cold start each time.
Writer - 0.6 seconds to start, 0.1 second to open the file. 22KiB, no images or other stuff, just text.
Calc - 0.9 seconds to a CSV import dialog, then 1.3 seconds to display it. Granted, it's only a 1KiB CSV.
Draw - 1 second to start, 2 seconds more to open the file, and another 3.5 seconds before it displayed the embedded images. 125MiB file, though, so it's understandable for it to take nearly seven seconds to open and render the file.
Impress - 0.7 seconds to start, file not found error on the last .ppt I'd opened.
Math and Base I've never used, and startup time seems to be fairly consistent so no point opening them.
Conclusion: I don't know what machine you're running it on, but LibreOffice has been fast for quite a while. I do remember waiting forever for OpenOffice to start, even with the preloader, but that no longer seems to be an issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @06:30PM
Took me only 16 seconds to load on this severely taxed machine I'm on now. That's pretty darn fast for this bad boy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 25 2015, @06:26AM
[Shaking head.] captain normal got dinged as a troll for asking a reasonable question? I just used the portable version of LibreOffice Writer to open a 3 page text-only document. It took 20 seconds before the splash screen even opened. It then took another 10+ seconds for the document to finish opening. That's a total of over 30 seconds. captain normal's question was right on target -- and to answer his question, it's still a problem, in my opinion. (It doesn't even bother me that it takes 30 seconds to open. These are large programs. It bothers me that the splash screen doesn't appear for such a long time.)
I also find it disappointing that nearly everyone responded back with "Get an SSD card!" (gman003 -- you wanted a timing test. Consider this mine, but without the SSD card.) Not everyone considers forking over money for new hardware a viable or even desired thing.
And before anyone calls me a MS shill, I use LibreOffice almost extensively. So extensively, in fact, that I just gave a small presentation to a bunch of C# programmers using Impress.
With all that said, I find the 4.4 GUI update pretty nice. The LibreOffice guys did a great job. Most of the changes I see are very minor, but added together it made a huge impact on the look and feel of the program and the impact was in a very positive way.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:42PM
It took 20 seconds before the splash screen even opened. It then took another 10+ seconds for the document to finish opening. That's a total of over 30 seconds.
Out of curiosity, what OS and LO version? I just tested with LO 4.3, 32bit Debian, on a system with a dual-core CPU that's something like 8 years old now, using a 7200rpm disk, and it took half the time you stated (15.3s). After flushing memory caches to be sure it was reading from disk, I used time -p lowriter, and closed the the application as soon as I got to an editable document. That means the time I got is actually slightly higher than real startup, since it also included a brief human interaction and program shutdown.
So, seriously, what are people using that's causing it to take 2-3x the startup time of an ancient Athlon X2 processor and spinning rust disk? Is this a Windows problem? Are you using PCs old enough to vote? Or are you guys just getting your numbers via rectal information extraction?
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:15PM
Windows 8.1 (64 bit), LibreOffice 4.4 Portable Version [portableapps.com], Intel i3-3110M 2.4 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 5200 rpm disk (laptop); The machine is approximately 2 years old. Except for the RAM, it's a standard Asus R503V with a 500MB hard drive. I'm not a hardware guy, so I guess you can look up the rest of the specs yourself if you want.
Numbers were not via rectal extraction, but by watching a clock with a seconds hand across the room. I was too lazy to get up and get my digital watch. (I suppose the way I keep time is little old school, huh?)
I know the low spin rate on a laptop hard drive, portable version, and on Windows all probably contribute to poor numbers... but if we're going to try to convert people over to LibreOffice, your everyday "Common Joe" people are going to have specs similar to mine and will probably have similar results. (Yeah, ok, most people won't do the portable version, but you get the idea.)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:07PM
Ok, well I wont blast you on the hardware if you aren't a hardware guy. Although that hard drive is anemic. You would seriously benefit with a ssd.
I will blast you on the software side though. Have you thought perhaps that it is because you are running the portable app version. It has to almost do a temporary light install every time you run it. Your test is more analogous to the time it takes to install and open.
So get off the grass old timer.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:48PM
[Smirking.] I know software. No, there is no "temporary light install" when you run a program. The same exes and dlls are loaded and executed between both installed and portable versions. (If you download the portable app, it unzips once, then you can use the executables repeatedly after that.)
There may be tricks that programmers use to fool you, though. I know older versions of Microsoft Office and the WordPerfect Suites used to "preload" a lot of files on bootup so it looked like the word processor or spreadsheet quickly popped up once the machine was done booting. In reality, you paid for it when you booted up (even if you never used that program when the machine was on) and you lost RAM to the preloaded files. I suspect Microsoft Office does the same today, although I haven't checked lately. I have no idea what LibreOffice does.
I do mention that I use the portable version because, yes, it could be a factor in some way and throw off the anecdotal timing tests we're doing here. If I get up off my lazy butt and run some trials between the portable version and the installed version, I'll post somewhere on this thread. If anyone does know off hand, I'd appreciate knowing more about it.
As for being an old timer: I have my reasons for running portable programs in Windows that are not important to this conversation. Hardware? I'll gladly accept any donations of time, hardware, and money that youngersters freely give to old people like me. I'd love to have a zippy laptop that I could use on a daily basis.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday February 26 2015, @04:25AM
Based on that, I'm wondering if it's either the "portable version" or the "Windows 8" part of the system that's the problem. Sure, the hard disk is slower, but it shouldn't be more than doubling the startup time. I've noticed before that file copy operations are, for whatever reason, extremely slow* on NTFS compared to ext3/4 on the same system. Or maybe it's just an issue with the portable version, or with the Windows port itself. If you figure it out, I'm curious which.
If it turns out it's a problem with the Windows version, maybe it just needs to start using the preloader as a default. Though Windows is also supposed to have that "superfetch"** thing that "learns" what apps you use and caches them into RAM in advance to speed up load times. If an average user (who wouldn't know about it or turn it off) is using LO it should be starting up pretty quickly based on that.
* Unrelated example that I always found funny: back in the day I used to use WinRAR in wine because there wasn't good native support at the time. Linux+wine+winRAR could create archives in about half the time as doing the same thing in Windows XP natively. Had similar experiences extracting RARs, and also with audio encoding tools.
** There's something similar available in Linux, but I've never found it necessary.