We recently received confirmation of a new version of LibreOffice, and now one of its developers has spoken out. Developer Markus Mohrhard has discussed features in LibreOffice 6 , revealing one of the most important functions of the most popular and free office suite in the GNU/Linux world.
Furthermore, the LibreOffice developers have opened development to the Community , asking, or rather, requesting what new features they want LibreOffice 6 and subsequent versions to have.
But the star new feature will be automatic updates. Finally, LibreOffice 6 for GNU/Linux will automatically update without any user intervention . The update process will require no action on our part, just like it currently works on macOS or Windows. However, there's a catch. In the case of GNU/Linux, this feature will only be available if you install from the official package on the website . In other words, if you installed LibreOffice from your distribution's official repositories, this feature will not be active.
For now, this is how Markus Mohrhard has explained it: now the distributions must decide between using a clean and complete version of LibreOffice with this new feature or using a modified version that will disable this new feature; but in either case, whether we choose one option or the other, our office suite will be updated.
Personally, I don't know if this new feature is a good idea or not, since one of the great things about GNU/Linux is that we have control over everything that happens in our operating system and we can modify or block it . However, with this new feature, it seems that this principle is no longer upheld, and LibreOffice will be updated without our knowledge or without knowing if it will affect our operating system. The controversy is brewing, although most users will probably update their LibreOffice to this new version , right?