Does LIbre Office 5 have lots of bugs on Ubuntu Linux?

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#1

I read that “There are masses of problems being reported with the combo of LO-5 & win-10.” I upgraded to Libre Office 5.0.1 on Kubuntu 12.04 and 14.04. Suddenly there seems to be many problems. LO crashes quite often when it used to be rock solid.

So, is it also true that there are masses of problems with LO on Linux?

Here’s one example I’ve experienced a lot: if I have done anything with Mail Merge, when I close one open document, LO crashes and all open documents are immediately closed. Recovery doesn’t always work.

Another example is font display. Documents in Writer display very poorly now, with fonts looking improper. This never happened previously.

There are many other instances of crashing that I have not taken the time to reproduce carefully. The situation is that LO crashes a lot whereas it never crashed previously.

Many features don’t work well, but these are new features to me, so I don’t know if these are new bugs, old bugs or things I just haven’t figured out yet.

I’ve been using LO (and OO) for about 8 years. But if Libre Office 5.0.x was my first exposure to LO, I don’t think I would ever come back.

#2

Like you, I’ve been using LibO Writer on Ubuntu (and Mint) for years. Upgrade to 5 brought one or two minor glitches, but one has been fixed (display of tab-type as you cycled in the ruler line) but the other is in bugzilla and getting a fix (it looks like: word/character count for non-ODT documents registers “0” until file is modified). Other than that: fine, pretty much. Fonts: is that “clear type” fonts (e.g., Cambria, Calibri, etc.) or any font? Stability has not been a problem for me.

#3

@Mountain - could you confirm which fonts are the worst performing for you? There could well be related issues that aren’t LibO in origin, but we would only know if we get some further detail. Thanks!

#4

The Writer documents I’m working with mostly (but not exclusively) use Trebuchet MS. However, I have seen the same rendering problems in Calc with Arial.

The readability of all documents at all times has gone down with LO 5.0.x. But sometimes something “flips” and a document or spreadsheet will go from looking OK to looking like the font changed to a bold monospaced font. The change is not consistent across the entire document. I cannot reproduce it, so I don’t know the steps.

#5

That’s a help - if it’s Trebuchet and Arial, there really is a problem. These are fine for me. I only have issues with “Cleartype” fonts, but that’s a known issue.

#6

I’m not sure if this is relevant, but I’m running 3 monitors. My center monitor is a Dell U3011 (30" 2560x1600). I’ve had the same setup for years. Nothing else changed when I upgraded to LO 5.0.

#7

More info. When I have several Calc and/or Writer documents open, upon closing one of them LO crashes. All documents then have to be recovered when I reopen LO. I cannot find any pattern to it.In my OP I thought it was Mail Merge related. Now I believe it is not. I cannot find the pattern, but the problem is very annoying.

This never happened before LO 5.0.x. My experience is that if you cannot give exact steps to reproduce a problem, filing a bug report is a waste of everyone’s time.

#8

I have now downgraded my main computer from LO 5 to LO 4.4.x and all these problems have gone away.

#9

Hi Mountain. Yup. In a better-expressed nutshell, exactly what I said in my answer.

#10

I use Calc a lot, in place of Excel, since version 3 and 2007, and there are innumerable irritating bugs which haven’t changed and make Calc difficult to use. I’ve reported some of these. But it beats me that no-one else has. Perhaps LibreOffice Calc’s users aren’t too demanding.

#11

Hi Mountain

LO’s re-branding of Beta code as ‘Fresh’ & rc (Release Candidate) as ‘Still’ is very clever. But it doesn’t stop lo-5 from being barely out of Development.

If you are going to use lo-5.0, then get used to using Bugzilla or the Bug Submission Assistant. However, give yourself a pat on the back that you do not have to deal with the nightmare of Windows on top of everything else.

If this helps then please tick the answer (:heavy_check_mark:)

…and/or show you like it with an uptick (∧)

#12

+1 for the “pat on the back”. Cheers! :slight_smile:

#13

My issue with filing formal bug reports is that the features giving me the most problems are new to me. I cannot confidently report a bug while I am trying to learn to use the related feature.

#14

@Mountain: understood. However, you would understand the feature much better after going through the bug-report process.

#15

I have been using LO5 since it was available on the ppa.

No issues on 14.04 64bit with Linux 4.2 and 12.04 32bit.
Even that stupid crash on LO4 when opening page format seems solved.

Some fonts appear strange, though, but I was not much affected by that.

After these good experiences on Ubuntu I tried to install (update) on Windows 10. Big mess:
→ no LO on Windows 10 anymore.

#16

Thanks for that info.

#17

I’m on LinuxLite 2.6, which is based on Trusty Tahr (14.04), and I was getting incessant crashes in 5, until I deleted the .config/LO folder and installed LO afresh. Something was corrupted there, and once it was gone things have been quite good.

#18

That is very interesting feedback. Thank you. I have since downgraded my main computer from LO 5 to LO 4.4.x and my problems have gone away. But I still have LO 5 on other computers so I will try your solution.

#19

I agree this took my attention. Also because of the bike must admit.
Have 2 desktops and one has LO 4.2 and the other LO 5.0.
I wait with upgrading the LO4.2 desktop.

#20

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