The Document Foundation announces that LibreOffice 4.4.7, the final point release for the 4.4 branch of the official suite, has arrived and is now ready for download.
At any given moment there are two different major branches of LibreOffice: one that’s more oriented towards conservative users and enterprise deployments, and the other one targeting early adopters, people who want the latest features.
It’s already common knowledge that LibreOffice has been adopted by quite a few enterprise settings, like city administrations for example. Major changes are not really a good idea for this type of users, so the LibreOffice developers are providing extended support for each new branch so that they don’t have to learn new things all the time.
Since this is the last minor update for LibreOffice 4.4.x, it means that soon they will have to move onto LibreOffice 5.x. There won’t be a LibreOffice 4.5 version. The end of life for this particular branch is scheduled for December 31, 2015.
What’s new in LibreOffice 4.4.7
“The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.7, the seventh and final minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family, with a few key fixes over the previous version. LibreOffice 4.4.7 is the ‘still’ version targeted to more conservative users and enterprise deployments. The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations with the backing of professional support by certified people reads the official website,” the developers wrote.
As usual, the new LibreOffice will land in repositories for various Linux distros, but not at the same time. If you have an Ubuntu OS, which already has the 4.4 branch, you can just add a PPA and get it that way. Enter these commands in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-4-4
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
You can also download the source packages for LibreOffice 4.4.7 from Softpedia if you want to compile them yourself, but you can also find the binaries for some of the components. In any case, you need to make sure that you don’t run two different versions at the same time.
Via Softpedia