LibreOffice 7 showed up last week with many important changes and new features, notably the Skia and Vulkan implementations to improve graphics performance, the use of Microsoft Office 2013/2016/2019 document formats instead of the 2007 version, and semi-transparent text support. However, just because The Document Foundation puts all its enthusiasm to make LibreOffice an excellent suite doesn’t mean that it has been well received, does it?
According to an entry published by The Document Foundation in its official blog, LibreOffice 7 has been downloaded during its first week 422,938 times. The foundation has clarified that this is what was posted through the official LibreOffice download page, so the alternative methods available to GNU / Linux users have been left out, including the official PPA for Ubuntu, Flatpak and rolling release distributions that have the office suite in their repositories.
Other data of interest according to The Document Foundation are the 113,235 visits that the official announcement has had, the 54,079 impressions of the official announcement tweet, the 48,874 visits of the corresponding video on YouTube and the 1,509 positive votes on Reddit. As we can see, the numbers are not bad at all, especially since we are talking about a segment that has been clearly dominated by Microsoft’s solution for three decades.
Of the many ways GNU / Linux users have to install applications, are there any that have been accounted for? According to Jiří Eischmann, manager of desktop engineering at Red Hat, the Flatpak version of LibreOffice 7 in Flathub, which is official, has been downloaded 43,912 times during the first seven days, leaving the number even closer to half a million. If to that we add the Official PPA and that it can be used by Ubuntu, its family and popular derivatives like Linux Mint and KDE neon, the chances that LibreOffice 7 has exceeded 500,000 downloads increase.
And in the same period of time #Flathub for Linux had 43912 downloads of LibreOffice 7.0, 10% of all downloads from the official download page for all platforms (Win, macOS, Linux). That’s not bad, not bad at all.@FlatpakApps FTW! https://t.co/ZYf7EncSmP
– Jiří Eischmann (@Sesivany) August 12, 2020
Although The Document Foundation makes LibreOffice available in Deb and RPM format, from MuyLinux we strongly recommend the use of an official or trusted repository because the Deb and RPM versions are not updated automatically, which exposes the possible security holes found in the suite. The fact that Flaptak is settling is good news in this regard, especially since it allows you to install recent applications without having to be aware of the “native” dependencies of the system.
As we see and looking at the market situation, it can be said that LibreOffice 7 has been well received, because apart from Microsoft’s great dominance in this segment, it must also be noted that the office suite is not usually software to be updated urgently for most users.
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