This latest RC is identical to the final version

Aug 3, 2015 12:30 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation has released the fifth and final Release Candidate for LibreOffice 5.0, which should be identical to the stable edition that will be made available in a couple of days.

We've already covered some of the major features that are going to be available with the new LibreOffice 5.0, and it's quite a lot. The developers are saying that the 5.x branch will probably be the biggest and most complex update released until now, so if you want to test it ahead of time, you can try and install this latest Release Candidate. It's virtually identical to the stable version, and only the number will differ in two days' time.

What very few people realize is that, despite the fact that the developers of LibreOffice identify as The Document Foundation, the work is done entirely by developers who work on this in their own time, and they don't make a dime of it. This is important to know because it happens too often for The Document Foundation to get blamed for a missing feature, when in fact it's not really their choice.

LibreOffice 5.0 RC5 is here and ready for testing

These release candidates are here to ensure that everything will go smoothly on launch day. As you can see from the changelog, it's not a major upgrade, and only a few issues have been corrected, and you can also check the list of devs that have contributed to the office suite.

According to the changelog, the content of a chosen listbox is now displayed in a tablecontrol, the new DOCX export function keeps the highlighting intact for all the colors, with the gtk vclplug, the real icon is now shown instead of just a black square, and the splash screen text has been refined.

If you have an Ubuntu OS, you can try the new branch by installing it from a PPA. Just open a terminal and enter these commands:

code
sudo apt-get purge libreoffice-core
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-prereleases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libreoffice
You can download LibreOffice 5.0.0 RC5 right now from Softpedia. The Windows and Mac OS X versions are also available.