Leading LibreOffice alternatives
Office Door
Image © gerain0812, 123RF.com
The majority of Linux distributions ship with LibreOffice as the default office software, but some interesting alternatives are out there right now if you're ready to taste a different suite.
An office suite is part of the standard package on any workstation. When you install Linux on a desktop computer, the free LibreOffice is usually installed on your mass storage device at the same time. But the ubiquitous LibreOffice package is not to everyone's taste. The LibreOffice package has put on some weight over the years and can be sluggish even on state-of-the-art hardware. And the suite sometimes causes errors with complex documents in Microsoft Office Open XML formats, which makes it difficult to work across platforms. Linux is all about choice, so this seemed like a good time to consider the alternatives.
Apache OpenOffice
The origins of OpenOffice [1] go back to the year 1984, when Marco Börries, a student from Lüneburg, Germany, developed the StarWriter word processing program for CP/M. StarWriter was later ported to the 16-bit DOS operating system and expanded to create a full-fledged office suite called StarOffice. Sun Microsystems acquired StarOffice and released OpenOffice.org as an open source version of the StarOffice suite. After an eventful history involving Sun and Oracle, the project ended up with the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation in 2011.
In the meantime, however, Oracle's licensing policy alienated many developers, and they created LibreOffice, an offspring free of corporate interests, which led to OpenOffice being increasingly sidelined. As a result, the two projects grew apart, with OpenOffice receiving far fewer updates, usually limited to bug fixes, due to a lack of active developers.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.