14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation's Mike Saunders announced the upcoming availability of the first bug hunting session for the forthcoming LibreOffice 6.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite.
The second major update to the LibreOffice 6 series, LibreOffice 6.2, is expected to arrive next year, in early February, and it may be the first release of the acclaimed and free office suite to drop support for 32-bit Linux builds. This means that 32-bit LibreOffice releases won't be available on the Linux platform anymore.
While The Document Foundation assures Linux users in the preliminary release notes for LibreOffice 6.2 that Linux x86 (32-bit) compatibility will not be removed from existing LibreOffice versions, the company noted the fact that no new builds will be produced for the Linux x86 platform starting with a future version.
It remains to be seen if LibreOffice 6.2 will be the first release of the open source office suite to drop support for 32-bit Linux builds, as The Document Foundation is yet to make it official which LibreOffice version will deprecate 32-bit builds. The current releases are still offered for 32-bit Linux systems as DEB and RPM files.
Besides deprecating Linux x86 (32-bit) builds, The Document Foundation also decided to deprecate the KDE4 and GTK+2 VCL (Visual Component Library) backend, which will be removed from the LibreOffice 6.2 release.
First bug hunting session for LibreOffice 6.2 set for October 22
LibreOffice 6.2 is expected to introduce a wide range of new features and improvements to the office suite, including better import and export of PPTX and PPT documents, better animation rendering, basic accessibility support for KDE Plasma 5 desktops, as well as various enhancements to Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw.
Meanwhile, the LibreOffice QA team will join their forces on October 22, 2018, for the first bug hunting session for the first Alpha development version of the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release. Mentors will be available for questions the IRC channel at #libreoffice-qa and Telegram from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC.
A dedicated session to test the new KDE 5 integration will be available from 14:00 to 16:00 UTC. More details about the first LibreOffice 6.2 bug hunting session are available here. Those interested in testing the LibreOffice 6.2 Alpha release will be able to download the Linux, Mac and Windows builds in the coming days.