By Larry Cafiero
Not exactly Linux-specific, but close enough . . . Bobby Barisov of Linuxiac reported on Friday that LibreOffice had released an updated verstion of the 26.2 series – this one 26.2.5 – which includes 21 bug fixes for Writer, Calc, Base, and the user interface.
According to the article, notable fixes include resolving a crash triggered by pressing Shift+Enter on the numeric keypad and fixing a macOS issue where opening multiple files could fail due to incorrect path concatenation.
“Writer users gain from several document-handling fixes,” the article continues. “Hidden empty paragraphs in DOC files now display correctly, editing conditional text fields no longer deletes them, and spaces after one-letter words at the start of a paragraph are maintained under specific AutoCorrect settings.”
The article also states that LibreOffice 26.2.5 addresses an HTML export issue affecting punctuation and other weak-directionality characters inside right-to-left text spans. In addition, pictures and shapes with transparent backgrounds should now appear more consistently with the final document output.
“Calc compatibility and functionality have been improved as well, with the DROP and TAKE functions now handling edge cases correctly, and TEXTAFTER matches more closely with Microsoft Excel 365 when using the ‘match end’ option,” the article states.
For a full rundown of everything that’s been fixed in LibreOffice 26.2.5, the official announcement is here.
The article concludes that “The Document Foundation also reminds users that LibreOffice 25.8 has reached the end of its supported lifecycle, so an upgrade to the current 26.2 branch is highly advisable. The next update, 26.2.6, is scheduled for early September.”
KDE Plasma 6.8 introduces new tool
Michael Larabel at Phoronix reported on Saturday that developers at KDE “have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor” for KDE Plasma version 6.8 “Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too.”
This report comes from This Week in Plasma, where the latest issue sums up all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes over the past week.
According to the Phoronix article, the primary highlight include “Plasma 6.8 is introducing ‘kscreenctl’ as a new screen control tool to eventually replace the kscreen-doctor tool. The kscreenctl tool provides various options to change the display output configuration.”
Other improvements in the next version of KDE Plasma are also available in the next version, and can be seen in the Phoronix article or the This Week in Plasma blog.
Faster on Linux? Well . . .
Yadullah Abidi at Make Use Of reported on Saturday that perhaps that Linux is not actually faster on various hardware, however it “seems” faster.
“Linux is often hailed as a magic fix for performance issues, especially on older hardware,” the article starts. “Dust off a decade-old laptop, slap on a Linux distro, and suddenly your machine will start feeling brand new. There is some truth to this, and compared to Windows, Linux will make your older machines feel much snappier, but responsiveness isn’t the same as newfound performance.”
Lately, Microsoft’s gaffes have led people to discover Linux, however “Linux isn’t going to make your hardware more powerful than it already is. Yes, it will feel snappier and will perform better, but it’s still limited by the hardware inside.”
So what’s the real deal here? “When people say Linux speeds up old hardware, what they’re actually experiencing is a reduction in overhead, not an increase in raw compute power,” the article explains. “Windows, especially post Windows 10, runs an entire army of background services including telemetry collection, update indexing, scanning routines, OneDrive syncing, Defender scans, and a handful of first-party apps that like to phone home even when you’re not using them.”
What is happening under the hood is a matter of system resources and how they are used. “As a result, you end up losing real performance as your machine is too busy running Windows instead of the apps, games, and browser tabs that make your daily life move,” the article explains. “If you’re installing Linux and your boot time drops to seconds instead of minutes, that isn’t happening because the CPU got faster — it just has fewer things to process.”
The article goes into detail and is worth a read.
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return on Friday.