LibreOffice 6.2 Branched, The Beta Dance Begins & x86 32-bit Builds Are Deprecated

LibreOffice 6.2 was branched from master this weekend and the first beta release tagged for this open-source, cross-platform office suite.

LibreOffice 6.2 Beta 1 is now being spun while a possible second beta may come in early December. At least three release candidates will be coming over the next two months while these open-source office suite developers hope to have out LibreOffice 6.2 either at the very end of January or in early February.

The beta one tag and latest 6.2 bits are available from libreoffice-6-2. The branching also marks the hard feature freeze for this release.

LibreOffice 6.2 will be bringing new custom widgets, better KDE/Qt5/LXQt integration, better PDF importing, PPT/PPTX importing and exporting fixes, support for OOXML agile encryption, elementary icon theme updates, and many improvements to its Android viewer.

Also notable is that with LibreOffice 6.2, Linux x86 32-bit builds are considered deprecated. In a future release they may drop the Linux x86 32-bit builds entirely from the release images they provide though it may still be possible to compile for x86 32-bit from source.

More details on the in-progress work for LibreOffice 6.2 can be found via the tentative release notes.