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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: 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.