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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: 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.