LibreOffice 7.5 launches with spell checking, dark mode and PDF Export improvements
LibreOffice 7.5 Community Edition is now available. The latest version of the open source cross-platform Office application ships with a number of important improvements and changes.
LibreOffice users may select Help > Check for Updates to download and install the update immediately. New users find downloads for all supported operating systems on the official LibreOffice website. Existing installations may also be updated using the downloaded installer
LibreOffice 7.5 requires macOS 10.14 or newer. The change follows Apple's policy regarding standard C++ library features. The release in August 2023 requires macOS 10.15 or newer according to the release notes.
LibreOffice 7.5
LibreOffice 7.5 Community Edition is a major new release. The official release notes are long and users may spend an hour or longer going through all the changes.
Users who do not want to spend that much time find the most important changes in LibreOffice 7.5 below:
- Spell checking and suggestions improvements for the languages Danish, Dutch, Estonian, German, Hungarian, Norwegian and Swedish thanks to Hunspell 1.7.2. Also, plain words of links are spell checked now as well.
- Numerous bookmarking improvements, including an option to edit bookmark text in the dialog window and bookmark visualization improvements.
- Images, embedded objects and text frames can now be marked as decorative so that they may be ignored by assistive technologies in exported PDF documents.
- Improvements to the accessibility checker, including several new rules.
- Initial machine translation support powered by DeepL integrated.
- Support for spell out number and currency formats added to Calc, the spreadsheet application.
- Impress supports cropped video for media shapes. Also, basic support for modifying table styles added.
- Chart supports data tables now.
- New application and MIME type icons.
- Font embedding is now supported on macOS.
- LibreOffice support on Windows, macOS and Linux for dark and high contrast operating system themes improved
- Automatic detection of high contrast mode is enabled again. Users may disable it under Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Accessibility.
- Improved insertion of kashida and other kashida improvements.
- Various improvements to filters.
- Improved version of a single toolbar interface implemented. It can be enabled under View > User Interface > Single Toolbar. Customization options are found under Tools > Customize > Toolbars.
- Improvements to font features, including the ability to disable those enabled by default. The settings are available under Format > Character > Font > Features.
- Macro selector remembers the last used macro now, which makes rerunning it easier.
- The experimental emoji toolbar button was removed. LibreOffice suggests using the system's emoji selector instead.
LibreOffice published a two minute video on YouTube that provides information on the major changes of LibreOffice 7.5.
Now You: do you use LibreOffice? What is your take on the new release?
@Anonymous Amon
If his ‘opponents’ were the ones using personal attacks, then why did so many of IH’s posts have admin edits? Why were so many removed entirely?
Why did he seem incapable of writing a post without words lol, lmao or shill in it?
A general response to many comments in this thread:
I seem to recall that at one point, Google dramatically cut how much ad revenue it shared with sites (at least with smaller ones, in possible violation of the Robinson-Patman Act, as if anyone in government still cared). This put Martin, then the site owner, in a bind. He had to raise more revenue to keep the site viable. That’s when he began offering sponsored deals that presumably gave him a cut of the action — as many other sites had been doing for *quite some time*. That apparently wasn’t enough, and in 2019 he sold site ownership to Softonic, a Spanish web portal / software hosting service. I don’t know how much editorial control Martin retained, or for how long, but sometime later, I believe, a new contributor, Ashwin, appeared and he has published generally worthwhile articles. Much more recently, two new contributors appeared. One has been publishing articles that are more or less okay, if sometimes not particularly groundbreaking, and the other … let’s just say I strongly suspect his articles are generated by ChatGPT with a view to shilling for certain 800-pound gorillas like Microsoft. Again, we don’t know how much editorial control Martin now has, and for all we know the new contributors were foisted on him by Softonic.
My approach is to pay attention to bylines and skip articles by authors I’ve learned not to respect or trust. (Over the years, I’ve been forced to do the same thing in *general news* outlets I used to trust, and other tech sites as well.) Sadly, many of gHacks’ most valuable former readers/commenters seem to have abandoned the site entirely. I understand the impulse. It’s like returning after a brief absence to a neighborhood you used to love because of its unique, quirky, independent stores, cafés, and restaurants and finding that 90% of them have been replaced by the likes of The Gap, Banana Republic, Starbucks, and McDonald’s.
As for commenter Iron Heart (portmanteau-ed by most of you into “IronHeart”), I just ignored the flame-war exchanges between him and his detractors and didn’t pay much attention to who started them. (If memory serves, it was usually his detractors.) He was pretty technologically knowledgeable about browsers in general and Brave in particular, and as a chromium-based-browser-configuration noob, I was *very* grateful for his extensive tips on how to configure Brave so that it was usable as my main fallback browser. (I’m still holding onto Pale Moon as my primary, but that’s becoming an increasingly tough row to hoe, with so many sites re-coding to support GAFAM standards/protocols and multi-process browsers exclusively.) Thanks to Iron Heart, I only have to surrender to Google Chrome’s and Microsoft Edge’s “privacy-raping” on rare occasions.
Will EU and US antitrust enforcement actions against Alphabet/Google enable a return to the good old days, when “unique, quirky, independent” sites were viable? We can only hope so. In the meantime, I still appreciate and enjoy Martin’s and sometimes a couple of other gHacks contributors’ articles … and really miss many of the old readers/commenters who have left.
@PeterC
I couldn’t have put it better myself – I learned a lot from Iron Heart including how to use Brave as my main browser and always respected his technological knowledge. This site isn’t the same without him.
Like you I only read Martin’s and Ashwin’s articles now – their quality can be generally guaranteed and they tell it as they see it.
But Martin has every right to do what he did with his site – it’s just a shame for those of us who still like to read thought-provoking stuff. It’s the conundrum of the internet – people want everything for free but they still demand high-quality stuff that in the past they had to pay for. Those numbers will never add up.
@Peterc
If IH was here he would call you an ignorant shill for using an outdated Firefox fork as your primary browser.
The problem with IH was he was not here to talk about tech. He had an agenda to push, some of his claims were valid, while others were not. If anybody dared challenge his agenda, then he would respond with personal attacks rather than well reasoned facts.
@Jody
That could equally and in many cases even more so be said about his ‘opponents’ who often just parroted what they heard elsewhere rather than reason with facts. Anyway, this site is a lot less entertaining without those debates.
I think he also uses Palemoon though as a secondary browser for some functionality that he needed that only it seemed to have.
@Peterc
@Anonymous Amon
Quote from Iron Heart about Pale Moon. This is one of his tamer ones.
“I find it highly ironic that you talk about Rust given how prolific you are on the Pale Moon forums, its dev being heavily anti-Rust for some reason. Also, you using Pale Moon disqualifies your opinion on security, you are using a single-process browser that was never properly analyzed or vetted by anyone except the single dev.”
@Jody:
Iron Hand *knew* I was still using Pale Moon as my primary browser, and while he didn’t agree with my choice, he never insulted me for it, let alone call me a shill. Instead, he just gave me a lot of help configuring Brave so that it would be more usable.
Yes, Iron Hand *was* clearly a Brave evangelist. But he *did* have a point. Firefox *does* depend heavily on Alphabet/Google for revenue, and no operation that wants to stay in business bites the hand that feeds. And Firefox *has* been straying from its original mission of absolute user privacy and user control. Remember when post-legacy Firefox started going off the reservation, and gHacks reader/commenter “pants” used to maintain a user.js script to remedy modern Firefox’s offenses? (I believe Martin may even have hosted that script for a time. If “Thorin Oakenpants” is the same guy as “pants,” his script is now called the arkenfox user.js and it’s hosted on GitHub. I apologize if my knowledge is out of date. I don’t like having to check for and counter privacy violations in my browsers every time they’re updated, any more than I like having to do it every time Windows gets updated. I haven’t used modern Firefox for actual browsing in a *long time*. I just keep the program and my extensions updated as an emergency fallback.)
Regardless, Iron Hand and Brave are probably going to ultimately “win this particular war” where I’m concerned. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are both *atrocious* in terms of privacy; Firefox has intermittent, recurring privacy “issues”; and Pale Moon is becoming increasingly less viable.
[Webmasters who code for multi-process browsers no longer bother to do garbage and cycle collection (since the process that spawns them is “going to get nuked anyway” when its tab is closed), and sites like these can generate *significant* memory leaks in single-process browsers like Pale Moon. (Are there any other single-process browsers *left*?) For sites that still work well in Pale Moon — it used to be almost *all* of them — I still find Pale Moon a *lot* easier to use than other browsers. Even though most legacy-Firefox extensions have fallen by the wayside, many of the most important ones (e.g., Tab Mix Plus and DownThemAll) have been forked into Pale Moon extensions, and Pale Moon extensions, whether forked or original, remain more powerful and convenient than their multi-process-browser counterparts. I’ve even hacked a few abandoned legacy-Firefox extensions myself and gotten them to work.]
As a Pale Moon user, I know I’m living on borrowed time. GAFAM/AAMAM protocols and multi-process design have taken over the Web, and no Web standards or government enforcement authority is going to intervene (not least because those authorities have been *taken over* by GAFAM/AAMAM). Sometime soon, the modern Web will force me to abandon Pale Moon (kicking and screaming), and I’ll have to use Brave and/or Librewolf until something better comes along. It was great while it lasted.
PS: Pale Moon is still being actively maintained (sans the “toxic” developer everyone used to rail about). If anyone wants to point to specific examples of privacy and security vulnerabilities in Pale Moon “because its core design is obsolete,” I’m all ears.
This is excellent. Microsoft Office is no longer necessary for home use.
I wonder if they have made something with the option dialogs for non-English languages.
The default size of the dialogs is too small for some of the text strings.
You can resize the dialogs and that usually fixes it, but I don’t remember if that value is saved.
I think LibreOffice uses QT for the UI, and it has some issues with Windows (besides localization “quirks”, issues with Hi DPI with different scaling and others.
By the way I wonder when Libreoffice will fix the bug that clears the icon at taskbar every each new update. It’s so annoying to pin up again the icon considering it’s just an update, for the God’s sake!
I might be wrong, but isn’t it windows fault?
@Martin Brinkmann:
Jeez! It seems like LibreOffice 7.4.5.1 was released just *yesterday*! (Okay, so I just checked and it was *six* days ago. Still, though! But wait — now that I’m looking at today’s LibreOffice download page, I see that “LibreOffice for Business” (the “LTS” version) is now at 7.4.5, so *that’s* probably why.) Also, on behalf of readers who don’t run an app-update checker a couple of times a day like I do, thanks for this “zero-day” article! Always appreciated!
@John G.:
I regularly run KC Softwares’ SUMo (Software Update Monitor, set to ignore beta releases) to check for available updates to my apps, and it’s been pretty reliable in letting me know when a new final release for LibreOffice is available — and *very promptly* after the release has been posted for downloading at The Document Foundation. Note that I use what was formerly called “LibreOffice Fresh” (the latest final release) and *not* what was formerly called “LibreOffice Still” (an earlier final release that The Document Foundation has selected for longer-term support … now called “LibreOffice for Business”?). LibreOffice Still / LibreOffice for Business has lower version numbers, and I don’t know whether it generates false positives in SUMo.
And yes, updating LibreOffice is a bit of a chore. LibreOffice’s internal updating mechanism didn’t work for so long that I gave up trying to update it that way. Instead, I go to LibreOffice’s download page, scroll down to open the release notes (for “Fresh,” the first version listed) on a new tab, read them, go back to the download tab and open the “info” link for “Help for offline use” in a new tab, copy the SHA256 checksum, go back to the download tab and download the “Help for offline use” installer, verify its checksum, go back to the download tab and scroll up to the main installer section, open the “info” link for *that* in a new tab, copy the SHA256 checksum, go back to the download tab, download the installer, and verify *its* checksum. Then I run the main program installer, and when that’s done, I run the offline help installer. (As a good Netizen and supporter of LibreOffice, I should probably look into downloading via BitTorrent, but I rarely use BitTorrent nowadays, plus … old dogs, new tricks.)
An additional source of hassle is that I archive my LibreOffice installers in a folder tree, first in 4-digit release number folders, and within those, in x64 and x86 subfolders. (It’s an unnecessary complication, but with my poor eyesight, it helps me avoid running the wrong installer.) The thing is, my primary browser, Pale Moon, remembers where previous downloads have been saved on a per-server basis, and LibreOffice’s main program installers and offline help installers are apparently hosted on different servers, so I have to manually change the save-to folder for *both* downloads. Not a *huge* hassle, but an unwelcome additional step. (Brave just remembers the last save-to folder, period, so the problem usually wouldn’t arise in Brave.)
[Why do I archive installers? Well, if you want to file a bug report, you have a *much* greater chance of getting it acted on if you do regression testing, to determine how long the bug has been present. Sometimes bugs are brand-new; sometimes more obscure, esoteric bugs or annoyances go *way, way* back. If you have the installers on hand to make “parallel”/portable installs of older releases to check for the bug in *them*, it’s much less of a hassle than if you had to download them from scratch. Also, if you have to revert to the previous release because of an intolerable bug in a new release — I think I’ve only had to do this *once* (with less-vetted “Fresh,” mind you) in six or seven years, and only with a 64-bit release for Windows; the Linux release was fine — it’s nice to already have the installers on hand for *that* as well.]
@John G. & @m3city:
I think LibreOffice’s Taskbar button gets zapped by the LibreOffice main-program installer’s cleanup routine. Thankfully, I also have LibreOffice pinned to my OpenShell menu, and the cleanup routine doesn’t think to go after *that* shortcut. Two clicks and I’m running LibreOffice and can re-pin its Taskbar button and drag it over to my preferred location. Of all the minor hassles attendant to updating LibreOffice, this is the least annoying one. Is it worth filing a bug report over? ~Maybe.~
@Microsoft Office Users:
Given that LibreOffice is a minor hassle to update, is it worth using?
Well, it’s always free to try (and use and keep), and I’m pretty sure the LibreOffice installer doesn’t steal your MS Office file associations unless you tell it to. You can install it on as many computers and in as many virtual machines as you want without getting dinged for it. You don’t have to subscribe. You don’t have to keep track of a license key in case you have to reinstall it. You can run multiple versions (as “parallel”/portable installs). There’s even a third-party utility that makes it easier to create parallel installs, in Windows at least.
As for privacy and security, no contest. LibreOffice wins hands down.
LAST-SECOND CORRECTION: LibreOffice has added limited/incomplete support for Visual Basic for Applications (MS Office’s “macro language”) since I switched (in the late stages of LibreOffice 3 or the early stages of LibreOffice 4). See, https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/sbasic/shared/vbasupport.html. VBA code *will* get imported/converted, but you might (will probably?) have to edit it. This actually *does* qualify as a quantum leap in macro conversion/support (even if it isn’t yet perfect), so please keep this in mind when reading my remarks about macros elsewhere in this comment.
As for usability, if you’re a basic user who’s used to the pre-Ribbon, menu-driven interface, no problem. If you’re used to the Ribbon, you might not be happy with any of the LibreOffice equivalents; at a minimum, there would be a learning curve. If you’re an advanced user who’s used to the pre-Ribbon, menu-drive interface, you’ll face a learning curve for some of the more advanced functions, which are often done somewhat differently in LibreOffice. [See, LAST-SECOND CORRECTION, above] If you create and edit macros, you’re probably going to face a *big* learning curve, especially if you’re not a programmer. (I’m not a programmer, and I just record macros and hack away at them until they work the way I want them to. My macros are obviously very basic. But to be fair, ever since MS Office switched from a simple macro language to Visual Basic for Something-or-Other, in the mid-to-late ’90s I think, I’d have to use the same approach in MS Office. Within the confines of the older MS macro language, I made some pretty sophisticated macros, but doing that now is beyond my abilities.) If you use functions that are exclusive to MS Office, or that are much easier to use in MS Office, well, obviously, you’re not going to be happy. (I’m a generally happy LibreOffice user, but I miss Word’s envelope wizard, the one that automatically generated a USPS barcode. I looked into trying to replicate that in LibreOffice a few years back and my brain melted. I’ve been super-busy until very recently and haven’t checked to see whether LibreOffice has caught up in the ensuing years.)
As for customizability, I can’t really say. I’ve customized my own LibreOffice UI a fair amount, with custom toolbar buttons and hotkeys, and my customizations have, with rare exceptions, remained pretty stable from update to update. However, I haven’t regularly used MS Office or attempted to customize its UI in quite some time, so I can’t compare the two. I suspect that LibreOffice is more customizable, like Pale Moon is compared to any chromium-based browser.
As for default keyboard shortcuts, the most common ones are pretty much the same as in MS Office; some of the ones for more sophisticated functions *might* be at least slightly different, though none come to mind. The difference is certainly *markedly* less than between most media players I’ve used. (*Super* annoying, right?) You can always customize differing keyboard shortcuts that annoy you, if any, to be the same as in MS Office. (I’m guessing that someone may have already posted a list of such customizations somewhere on the Net, and maybe even created a macro that assigns them. Well … now that I’ve done a quick websearch, maybe not. But I *did* find a Make Use Of article from 2021 titled “How to Quickly Set Up LibreOffice Writer to Run Like Microsoft Word.” The fact that the article doesn’t recommending changing any of LibreOffice’s default keyboard shortcuts suggests that keyboard shortcuts aren’t an issue for most MS Office users who switch to LibreOffice. I certainly don’t remember having any trouble with keyboard shortcuts when *I* switched. The article links to another 2021 Make Use Of article titled “LibreOffice Writer: The Ultimate Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet,” in case you want to check for yourself.)
As for availability of good-quality, pre-made templates, whether from the publisher or from third parties, well … that’s hard to say. I’m sure you’re going to find a *lot* more of them for MS Office than for LibreOffice. But I’m picky when it comes to templates, and when I use a pre-made template, I almost always customize it, whether in MS Office (previously) or LibreOffice (now). Of course, you can always load an MS Office template in LibreOffice and save it as a LibreOffice template. [See, LAST-SECOND CORRECTION, above.] MAJOR CAVEAT, however: Unless there has been a *quantum leap* in macro conversion that I never heard about, any macros that were in the original template are *not* going to convert, and you’re going to have to recreate them from scratch. Still, though, the layout, text, and formatting are probably going to come through pretty well, saving you at least *that* work.
BOTTOM LINE: It’s only going to cost you a little download hassle, a little drive space, and a little time puttering around, so why not give LibreOffice a try? And if you like it, end up keeping it, and have the ability to, *do* contribute to its development. If you can spare the money, make a donation. If you have more time than money, file high-quality, actionable bug reports and suggestions for improvement. (Many LibreOffice bug-fixers are unpaid volunteers. They *really* appreciate it if you do as much the of background work for them as possible. And if you *do* that background work, your bug report is *much* more likely to be assigned and acted on.) If you’re a coder, consider contributing bug fixes, extensions, or core-program code. An example of a highly useful (I’d say invaluable) extension is Tomas Bilek’s “Alternative Find & Replace for Writer (AltSearch).” (If you do anything more than *very basic* searches/search-and-replaces, and you don’t already use “regular expressions” on a *very frequent basis*, you NEED to install this extension.) An example of core-program functionality that could stand to be overhauled is indexing in Writer. (It’s currently split up into two separate functions: creating a new index entry, and editing existing index entries.) [Side Note: I use LibreOffice Calc as well as LibreOffice Writer, but I’ve tackled a major, long-term project in Writer and I haven’t in Calc, so I can’t think of any good extensions for Calc or core-program design deficiencies in Calc off the top of my head. I’m sure they’re out there.] Anyway, please try it, and contribute in some way if you can!
@Peterc
Yes, 7.4. was just released,
and the check for updates doesn’t work.
It seems there is a release almost monthly https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan
I wonder if switching to the Still branch would stretch out the update cycle.
Maybe LO could add a new feature, besides “check for updates,” they could add “check for security vulnerabilities.”
https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/security/advisories/
The nice thing about Linux is that the update manager updates everything, the OS and apps.
It takes a lot of time to maintain a Windows machine.
@Anonymous:
“The nice thing about Linux is that the update manager updates everything, the OS and apps.
It takes a lot of time to maintain a Windows machine.”
What *you* said, on steroids! The amount of time it takes to maintain a Windows machine is the reason I run WSCS and SUMo twice a day. I can tolerate spending five or ten minutes a couple times a day, but hour-plus-long app-updating sessions drive me *insane*.
I also used to maintain my dad’s two Windows laptops (he was good at science, bad at computers). Once, when I popped over to his place after he’d been out of town for a few months, there were not just a huge number of application updates waiting for me, but two Patch Tuesdays — on TWO computers. It took me literally SEVEN HOURS to complete that session. That seven-hour session is the reason I began using TeamViewer, so I could update his computers remotely on a more frequent basis.
SIDE NOTE: My dad’s laptops both ran Windows 7 at the time, but it was after spring 2015 and Microsoft’s updates could no longer be trusted without diligent vetting. I couldn’t just tell him to run Windows Update. (It’s *possible* that if he was out of town when a CRITICAL zero-day vulnerability got patched, I might have kept my fingers crossed and told him to run Windows Update anyway, but I don’t remember doing that. We might have just been lucky with the timing of his absences before we started using TeamViewer.)
During the few years I was also running Linux — which ended in March 2020, when I got a brand-new, *dramatically faster* laptop that Linux didn’t yet support very well — the only two manually installed apps I used were FreeFileSync and Tor Browser. I was using Linux Mint and Kubuntu, both Ubuntu derivatives. At that time, I don’t *think* FreeFileSync was in any Ubuntu/Mint/Kubuntu repo or available as a PPA, and certainly not in an up-to-date version, and Ubuntu’s Tor Browser package was not only out of date but also *atrociously bad*.
As a Linux noob, I had to learn how to install both programs manually. The Tor Project, well aware of how *epically bad* Ubuntu’s package was, provided *excellent* instructions. Either FreeFileSync or a third party must have provided adequate instructions, as well, since I also succeeded in getting that installed, without pulling out my hair.
I no longer remember the “sudo-related” details for updating FreeFileSync (or the directories involved, for that matter), but once the initial installation was done, I *basically* only had to extract (~unzip) the new package and copy its files over the old ones, like you do for a portable program in Windows. [Note that when I was actively using Linux, I had *no trouble* remembering the aforementioned details. They became as trivial as remembering to launch a Command window “as Administrator” before doing certain things in Windows and remembering what apps were installed in AppData instead of Program Files or Program Files (x86).] As for Tor Browser, once it was properly installed, its internal updating mechanism worked *exactly* the same as it does in Windows: easily, quickly, and reliably. All told, my Linux manual-app updating sessions took *at most* around the same time as a light, twice-a-day app-updating session did in Windows — but obviously on a *much* less frequent basis. (Once every four to six weeks for FreeFileSync? Once every few weeks for Tor Browser?)
As for the OS, repo apps, and PPAs, you said it: one-stop shopping and everything updated in a single operation (usually without a reboot). Heaven!
Oops! I meant to type WSCC (Windows System Control Center, which makes it easy to update Sysinternals Suite utilities and the vast majority of NirSoft utilities, plus miscellaneous others). To cadge a line from Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen,” “I’m just growin’ old.” And the fact that I’m citing a song from 1980 just buttresses my case!*
*Damn kids today, with their KPop and their hip-hop and their Lady Gaga and their Ed Sheeran… When *I* was young, we listened to Jimi Hendrix and Steely Dan and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Stanley Clarke and Jeff Beck. And we LOVED it! And when I was a KID, we had to walk five miles to school, in three feet of snow — and it was uphill both ways! What is the world coming to? ;-)
@Peterc, many thanks to you for the extended info and also for the good advices!
@m3city this bug only happens with Libreoffice since old times.
Did you report this issue?
@piomiq the way how the Libreoffice icons dissapear from taskbar, bug or issue I don’t know, has been reported for more than ten years ago and it’s widely known around the web.
How to disable dark theme for LO on win11?
Unless it’s moved–Tools > Options > Personalization.
And the article itself is actually valuable, as always from MB. I don’t follow Libreoffice release notes, updating it is a chore I resist to do, but at least I know there is an update, reading this site.
Oh, my dear fu**** bully who has been chasing me since the very begining around this site, I doubt very much that sucking up to MB he’ll give you a better consideration here.
You are the most abominable and annoying critter I have seen on this website for 15+ years. Compared to you IronHeart was a genius and a saint. Considering your level of stupidity I am almost certain you must be North American, nuisances like you are hard to be found outside Canada and USA.
@smaragdus and here you are again with another new nickname just to give us (and also to me) the worst of your poor education and wellfare. In order to maintain your high level of hate and decay, please do move to a non-democratic country, you will feel better with yourself.
@John G.
“Are you a machine, are you alive?”
Is that a bot, or just sb doing his job, which is to praise the authors here and every single article. And I’m not joking, the fact that I ask myself this question worries me – how web became a nonreliable place. Is that a real person, an honest, subjective commentary or a troll/paid praiser/bot. I won’t even touch the “quality and uniqness of ghacks” as it was years ago. But I guess that we – the readers are responsible for that as well – spoiled, used to consume information for free (ad-block free), and when MB signalled that one must contribute to keep this place alive – there were not enough. Or maybe it was too niche and good to keep going as it was in current state of internet. I don’t really know, but it is so ffffing sad to see the titles of entries on home page, then scroll down to comments on the actually intresting ones and see sth like above, suspecting what I just wrote in the beggining. Let me repeat myself – there was IronHeart, then Shaun journalism came by, now we have some copypasta who know where from and JohnBots.
@m3city: Accuses people of writing like bots.
also @m3city: Writes a too-long-to-read comment filled with grammatical and spelling errors, exactly like a bot would do.
Yes it is kinda long. I went with the flow. And there are errors like bot might make.. or a non native english speaker.
And ironheart was not good. I guess he had knowledge, experience but way too agresive, goalpost shifting.
Yes, I agree: It was the unique niche gHacks filled that made the site invaluable. Now one can go to other sites and find the same information provided here–usually two or three days earlier.
The news here is now “stale, putrid, poorly presented, biased, incomplete,” and simply not gHacks anymore.
Still enjoy Martin’s articles–tone and writing style; his background knowledge far surpasses most tech writers, so . . . what to do?
IronHeart was good.
Back to Libre Office–my gosh! The server was down for a regular download–had to torrent. The upgrade to forever and a day, but it works. I like the idea of integrated DeepL and “kashida” justification improvements may help many users.
But, when I can pick up a legit Office Pro 2021 License for $30.00, I’m not so sure whether I want to continue using Libre.
Time will tell.
> “When I can pick up a legit Office Pro 2021 License for $30.00.”
You can ? I don’t think so. The price says it all.
@Clairvaux
> “When I can pick up a legit Office Pro 2021 License for $30.00.”
MS Office for $39.99 promoted on this very site!
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/11/24/ghacks-deals-microsoft-office-professional-2021-for-windows-or-mac-lifetime-license-91-off/
I know. This does not mean it is legitimate.
I only give thanks for the articles I have enjoyed. Please search for a life and get peace.
Thanks for the article!
Seconded. Thanks Martin.