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LibreOffice 3.5.4 released with up to 100% performance improvements
- iwwr 14y agoSo how is Apache's new OpenOffice since they got custodianship?
- Maakuth 14y agoMost of the community developers have jumped the bandwagon to work with LibreOffice. It seems that the developers still with OpenOffice.org are mostly working for IBM and Oracle. The project just did the first release (http://www.openoffice.org/news/aoo34.html http://www.openoffice.org/news/aoo34.html) after two years of silence, but there's still a lot to do before they are featurewise competing with LibreOffice. You can see a feature comparison here: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-comparison.html http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-compari...
- mindcrime 14y agoIt's going very well, actually. There was just a release a couple of weeks ago, and IBM just donated the source code to their Symphony product - which was derived from OOo. Symphony apparently has some really nice UI features which will hopefully make it into the mainline of Apache OO. There is talk on oo-dev about starting the process of graduating from the Apache Incubator, which is an encouraging sign.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dmboyd 14y ago100%? so now instead of taking X amount of time to do something, it takes 0 time (X-X*100) to do something? Or have I completely misunderstood what a % performance improvement is?
- dan85 14y agoNow it's taking half, because it's twice as fast.
- obiterdictum 14y agoOr you can interpret it the other way: before the code could complete X units of work (whatever the metric), now it can complete X + X in the same time (2X).
- ryankirkman 14y agoI think you're looking for an inverse relationship. e.g. My car has 200hp and can do a quarter mile in 20 seconds. If I then increase my car to 400hp (a 100% increase), let's pretend I can now do a quarter mile in 10 seconds. Thus, a 100% increase in performance drops cuts my quarter mile (or in this case processing) time in half.
- dsrguru 14y agoIf we assume "100% improvement" means "100% increase," the most common definition of the latter is simply 2x the former amount. So a 100% improvement in performance likely means 2x the former speed.
- dbaupp 14y ago100% performance improvement? That seems a little ridiculous (and impossible). I can't find the data that this claim comes from, so I have a feeling they might mean 50% performance improvement (i.e. 1s => 0.5s). Is there more detail anywhere? (Edit: would it be possible to have an explanation for why this was downvoted? If I've said something stupid/wrong, I'd like to be corrected please.)
- mtgx 14y ago100% performance improvement = 2x as fast as before
- dbaupp 14y agoThanks! I just had the terminology backwards: performance is number of ops in a given time, not the amount of time for some number of ops. (It seems every time performance comes up I manage to get it wrong.)
- koide 14y agoTo begin with, it's perfectly possible to increase several orders of magnitude the performance of a piece of code, you can Google for plenty of examples. In addition, going from 1 sec to 0.5 sec is indeed 100% improvement. Given 0.5 sec = 1 ; 1 sec = x, then x = 2
- ars 14y agoGoing from 1s to 0.5s is not a 100% improvement, it's a 50% decrease (in time). i.e.: 100% increase = 50% decrease. Percents are weird to calculate.
- dbaupp 14y agoI know that going from 1 to 0.5 is a 50% decrease rather than a 100% improvement. (I actually said this in the parent comment.) But it's alright, I've got my definitions sorted out now.
- av500 14y agoDoes it import Microsoft document formats 100% better? That' the biggest issue that Open/LibreOffice has and until that one is solved for good, the rest does not matter much... EDIT: not wanting to contribute further to the fall of HN, I edited M$ into Microsoft
- cowmix 14y agoI love Open/LibreOffice but you are 100% correct.
- AlexFromBelgium 14y agoI would argue that's a Microsoft problem... I don't think office files are even compatible with their own standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML .
- DeepDuh 14y agoIt IS the user's problem as he will be forced to use MS Office for most documents where there are other people involved. Note: Both google docs and iWorks handle this significantly better.
- av500 14y agoA problem for Microsoft? or one by Microsoft? Yes, sure it's caused by Microsoft, but it has to be fixed on the LibreOffice side, since I am sure Microsoft won't do anything about it.
- bad_user 14y agoI've had compatibility problems between different versions of Microsoft Office. This is also Microsoft's problem.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoNot until they have competition able to break their lock-in, till then the craziness of their format acts as a barrier to entry. So again, it's a problem created by Microsoft, but it's a problem for their users and competitors. And that's why it's not going to be fixed.
- eliben 14y agoI really dislike the term "up to N%" - this reminds me of sleazy commercials reporting "up to 80% discount". 0.2% is also "up to 100%". Can't more accurate figures be reported?
- mtgx 14y agoIt could mean it's 100% faster for some tasks. So it could be 100% faster in loading docx or whatever, and only 20% faster in loading .doc. Are you looking for something like an average speed improvement? That probably wouldn't be very accurate, either. But they could say the new LibreOffice is 20%-100% faster, I suppose.
- d0ugal 14y agoSince somethings are bound to have not changed at all in terms of speed it would probably have to be 0%-100% (Or, well, up to 100%.)
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoOr if they've used some kind of tradeoff, certain things could be much slower (or use more memory, etc.)
- eliben 14y agoHow can it be 100% faster at anything? This is mathematically impossible. If a task used to take 100 seconds, 1 second (an unlikely improvement!) is just 99% faster.
- zokier 14y agoThroughput can be 100% faster. Eg if it could previously decode docx at 100kb/s and now can do it 200kb/s then it would be 100% faster. Or wouldn't you say that a car that goes 100 mph is 100% faster than a car that goes 50 mph?
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- samet 14y agoI can run new libre from /opt/libreoffice3.5/program only, without Gnome or KDE. Old versions add softlinks to runnable paths. This new version doesn't.
- erkin_unlu 14y agouse gnome-do
- erkin_unlu 14y agooh really, can they open docx files on ubuntu 11.10 now? or do we just have to watch libreoffice crash everytime trying opening one of those?
- samet 14y agoopenoffice/libreoffice family can open docx for a long time.
- erkin_unlu 14y agoi know, but on a fresh ubuntu 11.10, it chooses to crash, now i updated to 3.5.4, it's finally OK with it. i hope at least.
- sgt 14y agoWhether it's 100% or 40%, I'm very happy with this. The problem with OpenOffice for many years was that it was very slow, and it's even a problem today (e.g. if your machine is heavily loaded and you find yourself having to start an office suite, you usually regret it).
- lloeki 14y agoNot just when under load. Up until now, it was a pain watching the UI match up the information around caret position (e.g toolbar like bold, italic, font, etc... and in the style window) full seconds after it moved there.
- gcb 14y agoJust fished helping the wife with a paper on libreoffice... Heck latex is the ultimate user friendliness. But mostly because i can write in vim. openoffice is a joke. Don't know if it's because i still can't find how to fine tune key shortcuts but all the "speed" problems were me hunting down the same 3 items in a menu over and over. They should move all the focus on maintaining a non-word clone interface.
- antidoh 14y agoYes exactly. I use LO because I use Linux and don't want to pay for Office on Windows until/unless I have a requirement. But I detest using LO, and your menu example characterizes my overall experience. Chasing Office compatibility is a losing bet. I think they'd do much better tracking Office at somwhere between 50 and 80%, with sensible default/fallbacks, and spending the bulk of their time making LO the absolute best office solution on Earth. tl;dr If you try your hardest to be like Office, you're going to suck worse than Office.
- avallark 14y ago100% performance increase!! thats a bit too much of a statement. I am wondering if a product can have an 100% performance increase, then it must be pretty badly built the first time around. isnt it? I like openoffice, and didnt really think it needed a 100% performance upgrade, but hey more is better.
- olaf 14y agoOn Ubuntu 10.04 compared to Open Office Writer 3.2, storage of a 209 pages document with Libre Office Writer 3.5.4.2 is even slower. Program startup of Libre Office Writer is also slower. Minor detail: after unpacking "LibO_3.5.4_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz" I got a directory "LibO_3.5.4rc2_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US", the "rc2" lets me doubt, that this is the release version.
- velodrome 14y agoIn general, I think vendors should be more transparent about performance and reliability: Microsoft Office 2011....Now using up to 30% less bugs, 20% faster load times, and you get X amount of features. At least performance/reliability would be considered a feature. It would be better than a lot of the bloatware that comes out these days. Users should be conditioned to ask about performance and reliability of a product rather than how many features they added. You clearly see this from Apple but not Microsoft.
- noveltyaccount 14y agoIf Libre Office or Open Office really want to get ahead, they need to innovate on their user interface. Being libre/free isn't enough of a reason for some of us, what we need is ease of use and productivity. The Ribbon has been a great step forward IMO and I'd love to see the Libre team challenge it with something even better. Traditional menu bars feel so... 90s.
- kfk 14y agoRibbon is just stealing screen estate.
- acheron 14y agoYou are literally the first person (not counting Microsoft press releases) that I have ever heard praise the ribbon UI. If you like it, great, but I'm pretty sure you're in the minority.
- Wartz 14y agoI like the ribbon.
- noveltyaccount 14y agoLiterally every person I've talked to in the corporate world enjoys the ribbon. Only geeks dislike it. It's like saying GUIs are stupid because a geek can be proficient on a command line.
- fidz 14y agoThis is good news actually, we always want improvement in every new software version. But, i need a better, truly far better, presentation software. If we compare between Ms Office, iWork, and Libre, the only thing i don't like with Libre is the Impress. Impress do presentation like 10 years ago. No keynote-like (just like MS do in Office 2k10) 3D animation, no simple color picker, no shadow effects, no gradient,..
- jcurbo 14y agoSo what makes it so much faster? Did they fix a major bug causing it to slow down?
- dminor 14y agoGreat. Now how about getting around to outline view, which just celebrated its 10th birthday in the OO bug database?
- kinleyd 14y agoI won't get into the nitty gritty of how much faster it is, or how that kind of speed improvement should be calibrated. All I can say is it loads a heck-of-a-lot faster than it did previously - and also add a big thank you to the folks at LibreOffice.