Beginner upgrading to LO 24.8.0

Arcadia · August 31, 2024, 12:41am

Please bear with a neophyte beginner. Currently running the following:
Version: 7.5.9.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: cdeefe45c17511d326101eed8008ac4092f278a9
CPU threads: 12; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 22631; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-GB (en_GB); UI: en-GB
Calc: threaded

OS Name Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

I should like to upgrade to LO 24.8.0, which means downloading it manually.

The query: Should I remove the existing version before downloading the new one? If not, will my existing customization and preferences for the Writer programme (including the customized dictionary and Autotext) be preserved, or will I need to start from scratch after the new version has been installed?

erAck · August 31, 2024, 7:27pm

Apart from that, for “a neophyte beginner” I’d rather recommend to upgrade to 24.2.5 instead of the very fresh 24.8.0, if there isn’t a specific need (feature-wise) to use 24.8.x.

fpy · August 31, 2024, 8:13pm

Ash733 · August 31, 2024, 2:02am

Not specifically required to uninstall the old version first; in most circumstances the new installer will do that for you and your preferences/profile etc will be kept.

However, unless you can’t easily recreate your environment I’d recommend backing up your profile and starting again. A few problems and bugs seem to occur for some people when upgrading from 7.x to the new version and creating a new profile seems to resolve them so if it’s easy enough to recreate whatever customisations you have it might be better to start fresh.

Alternatively you now know that so if you run into issues down the line you can try creating a fresh profile then. Up to you.

mikekaganski · August 31, 2024, 6:24am

Note that the fresh profile is orthogonal to the need (there is none typically) to remove the old version, and uninstallation of the old version will not clear the profile.

In the 24.8 cycle, we created a problem where upgrading from 24.8.1 to 24.8.2 required a clean installation (tdf#162589). However, these are typically caught at pre-release phase (24.8.1 is not yet released), and hopefully won’t affect users after the release.