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LibreOffice 5.4 Office Suite Is Now Available as Flatpak and Snap Packages

Lets Linux users deploy it on virtually any distribution

Aug 9, 2017 16:15 GMT  ·  By
LibreOffice 5.4
   LibreOffice 5.4

The Document Foundation on Wednesday announced via the official Twitter account for the LibreOffice office suite that Flatpak and Snap packages of the latest 5.4 release are now available for GNU/Linux users.

LibreOffice 5.4 was released less than two weeks ago as the latest and greatest version of the open-source and cross-platform office suite for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, but also the last point release for the LibreOffice 5 series as The Document Foundation will no focus their efforts on LibreOffice 6, which should bring massive improvements.

Back to LibreOffice 5.4, the major release added a brand new file simplicity concept that makes the XML description of a new a document outputted by LibreOffice being with 50% smaller for ODF/ODT files and around 90% smaller for OOXML/DOCX files, as well as an extra layer of improvements to the Writer, Calc, and Impress components, which we've detailed in our in-depth report.

It's easier to install LibreOffice 5.4 on virtually any Linux OS

As usual, The Document Foundation packaged the LibreOffice 5.4 office suite as DEB and RPM binaries for both 64-bit and 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, along with the source tarball for those who want to compile the application themselves. But to make it easier to install LibreOffice 5.4 on virtually any Linux OS, they are now making it available in the Flatpak and Snap universal binary formats.

In other words, you can easily deploy the brand new LibreOffice 5.4 office suite on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution that's compatible with Red Hat's Flatpak or Ubuntu's Snappy universal binary format. While the LibreOffice 5.4 Flatpak package can be downloaded from the official website, the Snap version can only be installed via command-line from the Ubuntu Snappy Store (e.g. sudo snap install libreoffice), but remember to uninstall the version installed from the official repos first.