A document format is a tool for sharing knowledge and, as such, should be as simple and accessible as possible in relation to the complexity of the document content itself. This remains true even when the format is based on an XML schema that is hidden from users when the document is displayed on screen.

Unfortunately, while an XML schema can be simple, it can also be unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features. This is true even if the on-screen documents are identical. In this case, complexity is an intentional tactic used to lock users into a vendor, as is the case with the Microsoft 365 document format.

An XML schema comprises the structure, data types and rules of an XML document and is described in an XML Schema Definition (XSD) file. This tells the PC what to expect and checks that the data follows the rules. In theory, XML and XSD together form the basis of the concept of interoperability. However, in practice, an XML schema can be made so complex that it becomes a barrier rather than a bridge.

An “artificially complex” XML schema goes beyond the level of complexity needed to display even the most intricate content on screen. In fact, it is completely disconnected from the actual complexity of the content, to the extent that even a simple sentence such as “To be, or not to be, that is the question” becomes an inextricable sequence of tags that users cannot access.

This artificial complexity is characterised by a deeply nested tag structure with excessive abstraction, dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements, non-intuitive naming conventions, the widespread use of extension points and wildcards, the multiple import of namespaces and type hierarchies, and sparse or cryptic documentation.

In the case of the Microsoft 365 document format, the only characteristic not present is sparse or cryptic documentation, given that we are talking about a set of documents totalling over 8,000 pages. All the other characteristics are present to a greater or lesser extent, making life almost impossible for a developer trying to implement the schema.

To illustrate how this translates into a lock-in strategy, consider a railway system where the tracks are accessible to all, but the main train manufacturer imposes its own incredibly complicated control system. In theory, anyone could build a train compatible with the tracks, but the control system specifications are so convoluted that only the main train manufacturer can ultimately offer rail services.

The worst thing is that passengers don’t realise they are being held hostage by technical constraints that they cannot understand until ticket prices rise or the number of cities served declines. At this point, the main manufacturer can dictate its terms, which passengers are forced to accept.

This is very similar to what is happening in the world of information technology, where Microsoft is effectively forcing its customers to switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11 against their will. This switch has no technical justification and locks customers into using Windows 11 and Microsoft 365. This is because customers have completely ignored the problems that arise from using proprietary technologies.

If, over the years, the millions of Microsoft users who uncritically accepted a narrative that was credible to non-technical users but divorced from technological reality had taken a critical stance towards this monopoly, which would have raised doubts in any other sector, we would be in a very different situation today.

Instead, these users – including governments and supranational organisations – have allowed lock-in strategies, in which Microsoft 365’s artificially and unnecessarily complex XML document schema plays a fundamental strategic role, to become increasingly sophisticated and pervasive.

Therefore, if you are developing or choosing an XML-based system, bear in mind that complexity imprisons people, whereas simplicity and clarity set them free.

LibreOffice 24.8 has now reached the end of life, so all users have to update their free office suite to the latest release

Berlin, 17 July 2025 – The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.2.5, the fifth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.2 family for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux OSs, available for download at www.libreoffice.org/download [1].

LibreOffice 24.8 has reached the end of life, which means that this release – which includes dozen of fixes and enhancements that further improve reliability, performance and interoperability – is suggested for production environments, and all users should update their installation as soon as possible.

LibreOffice 25.2.5 is based on the LibreOffice Technology, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – either from TDF or from the ecosystem – that fully support the two ISO standards for document formats: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the closed and proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

Products based on the LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF recommends a LibreOffice Enterprise-optimized version from one of the ecosystem companies, with dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years.

English manuals for LibreOffice 25.2 Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Math are available for download at books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.

Downloading LibreOffice

All available versions of LibreOffice for the desktop can be downloaded from the same website: www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project by making a donation: www.libreoffice.org/donate.

[1] Fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.5/RC1. Fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.5/RC2.

Hello everyone,

Many thanks to our sponsors and to all of you who support the project with your donations.

Linux Mint 22.2

The team is working on a BETA release for Linux Mint 22.2.

This new version introduces an HWE kernel, fingerprint authentication, theme updates, accent color support and improved libAdwaita compatibility. Work also continues in the Cinnamon edition, to make input methods and keyboard layouts compatible with Wayland.

Packages and projects are being finalized. Pull requests are being merged. There is no set date for the release but we’re hoping to get the BETA out by the end of July or the beginning of August.

LMDE 7

After Linux Mint 22.2 gets its stable release, the focus is likely to switch in September to LMDE 7, codenamed “Gigi”.

Gigi will come with all the improvements featured in Linux Mint 22.2 but on top of a Debian 13 package base instead of Ubuntu 24.04.

Another key improvement in LMDE 7 compared to LMDE 6 will be that it will support OEM installations.

Moderation

We unfortunately had to tighten moderation settings on this blog and it’s a real shame.

When we say everyone is welcome here, it means absolutely EVERYONE, no exceptions. This can only work if divisive topics are left behind and people refrain from labeling or excluding each other. Here, we’re all the same. Everybody’s welcome to participate. There’s no such thing as “freedom of speech”. We’re not here to fight for such or such ideas, we’re here to build something together and to protect our project and our community. We want comments to be on-topic and constructive, always.

We will not tolerate any kind of ideology.

We’re already bombarded by commercial spam. This is one of the last places in our community where you can interact without having to authenticate. I’m really hoping it can stay that way.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in June:

A total of $15,453 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 468 donors:

$600, Eric F. aka “f0r73”
$531 (3rd donation), SunWare Solartechnik Produktions-GmbH & Co KG
$531, David W.
$500, Luke | onlyfastcode.com
$400, Maxwell
$300 (4th donation), Gregory F.
$265, H.J.M. S.
$250 (4th donation), Benjamin M.
$212, Loraine M.
$200 (9th donation), James F.
$200, Gail N.
$159,
$159, Daniel M.
$150, Loretta O.
$120 (7th donation), Michael P.
$107 (2nd donation), Paul E.
$106, Camping-Park L%FCneburger Heide
$106, Cryptobuffet
$106, Hans D. aka “HWD”
$106, Johannes H.
$106, Ludwig A.
$106, Murray L. H.
$106, Ole H.
$100 (22nd donation), John Mc aka “Land Research Project“
$100 (14th donation), Mountain Computers, Inc aka “MTNCOMP aka GGPCTU“
$100 (5th donation), Dale H.
$100 (2nd donation), Anita L.
$100 (2nd donation), Mark S.
$100, Andrey S.
$100, Brent F.
$100, gerald S.
$100, John B.
$100, Travis F.
$100, William R.
$84 (3rd donation), Sebastian Friedrich
$70, Nick M.
$61 (72nd donation), Michael R.
$53 (18th donation), Paul S. E. aka “Paul”
$53 (11th donation), Jyrki A.
$53 (11th donation), Mimi
$53 (5th donation), CH
$53 (4th donation), Derek M.
$53 (4th donation), Hakan C.
$53 (4th donation), Marius M.
$53 (3rd donation), António Salsinha – Graphic Designer
$53 (3rd donation), Frank J.
$53 (3rd donation), Henk B.
$53 (2nd donation), David
$53 (2nd donation), Marek Stapff
$53 (2nd donation), Mark B.
$53 (2nd donation), Peter F.
$53 (2nd donation), Stefan R.
$53 (2nd donation), Tom D. C.
$53, Alexander E.
$53, Christian A.
$53, Dominik B.
$53, Felipe A. I.
$53, Jens K.
$53, Juan M. L. Z.
$53, Karl W.
$53, Lars-olof G.
$53, Laurens R.
$53, Manfred M.
$53, Michael Z.
$53, Nina W.
$53, Paul R.
$53, Pieter V. W.
$53, Rick van den Bergh aka “Nostalgia Realm“
$53, Stefan B.
$53, Stefan K.
$53, Toni A.
$50 (9th donation), Mothy
$50 (6th donation), Anthony C. aka “Ciak”
$50 (5th donation), Ranald C.
$50 (4th donation), Stephen B.
$50 (3rd donation), Kris J.
$50 (2nd donation), Alan G.
$50 (2nd donation), Andrew B.
$50 (2nd donation), Bernard B.
$50 (2nd donation), Dinilson P.
$50 (2nd donation), Hubert R.
$50 (2nd donation), Robert J. C.
$50 (2nd donation), Steven F.
$50 (2nd donation), Todd S.
$50 (2nd donation), William M. aka “BillMcG”
$50, andy_van_isle
$50, Anonymous
$50, Brandon L.
$50, Daniel M. P.
$50, Daniel W. S.
$50, Isaac L.
$50, Isabella S. R.
$50, Jimmy O.
$50, John S.
$50, Jonathan C.
$50, Khalid A.
$50, Matthew N.
$50, Richard Pate Photographic Art
$50, Robert J. E. J.
$50, Ryan B.
$50, Thomas D.
$50, thomas J.
$50, Tristan C.
$50, Victor C.
$50, Wai C.
$40 (10th donation), Eric W.
$40 (2nd donation), Gary S.
$37 (7th donation), Anthony G M.
$37 (6th donation), Anna U.
$36, Jean M.
$35 (8th donation), P W E.
$31 (2nd donation), Gianni G.
$31, Erica O.
$31, Oliver R. aka “LinuxOlli“
$31, Stephen R.
$31, William N.
$30 (2nd donation), Paul H.
$30 (2nd donation), Yusuke M.
$30, Bernard G.
$30, Dan R.
$26 (2nd donation), Abilio R.
$26, Anastasiia D.
$25 (52nd donation), Linux Mint Sverige
$25 (20th donation), Richard N.
$25 (11th donation), Mihnea Rădulescu
$25 (6th donation), Gary D.
$25 (2nd donation), Mark O.
$25 (2nd donation), Theron K.
$25, paolo C.
$25, Stephen K.
$25, Stephen M.
$25, Travis T.
$24 (28th donation), aka “AsciiWolf”
$22 (4th donation), Cevad O.
$21 (108th donation), Johann J.
$21 (60th donation), Peter E.
$21 (27th donation), Stefan W.
$21 (22nd donation), Benjamin W. aka “UncleBens”
$21 (21st donation), Marek S.
$21 (13th donation), Emanuele Proietti aka “Manuermejo”
$21 (9th donation), Peter C.
$21 (6th donation), Gabriele G.
$21 (5th donation), Stephen C.
$21 (4th donation), David W.
$21 (4th donation), Roland K.
$21 (3rd donation), Jean-pierre V.
$21 (3rd donation), Kris K.
$21 (3rd donation), Marc R.
$21 (3rd donation), Mateusz M.
$21 (3rd donation), Philip S.
$21 (3rd donation), Toon V.
$21 (2nd donation), Alfonso B.
$21 (2nd donation), christophe O.
$21 (2nd donation), Florian A.
$21 (2nd donation), Frank W.
$21 (2nd donation), Leonard H.
$21 (2nd donation), Martin H.
$21 (2nd donation), Pgm R.
$21 (2nd donation), Volker W.
$21 (2nd donation), Weinand S.
$21, Andre V.
$21, Andrea F.
$21, Antonia H.
$21, Armin S.
$21, Bernd G.
$21, Bernhard S.
$21, Curd-Juergen S.
$21, Didier E.
$21, Dominique V.
$21, Felix R.
$21, FLEURIVAL H.
$21, Javier R.
$21, Jochen E.
$21, Julius J.
$21, Kari B.
$21, Kevin G.
$21, Kevin Schnurbusch aka “Istalrî”
$21, KPRco
$21, Liam T.
$21, Linda V. E.
$21, LJ W.
$21, Lorenz G.
$21, Luca G.
$21, Luk%E1%9A L.
$21, Marco R.
$21, Martin D.
$21, Matthias W.
$21, Mesut M.
$21, Mili D.
$21, MIQUEL R. P. aka “Maki”
$21, MR J. R.
$21, Odin B.
$21, Reg L.
$21, Ren%E9 C.
$21, Ronny S.
$21, Sebastian B.
$21, Sebastian L.
$21, Sonja C.
$21, Stefan A. aka “Keulinsche”
$21, Tomas K.
$21, Vadim B.
$21, Vasco S.
$21, wietze B.
$20 (69th donation), Bryan F.
$20 (47th donation), John D.
$20 (33rd donation), vagrantcow
$20 (28th donation), Aimee W.
$20 (12th donation), redman
$20 (9th donation), DaveW
$20 (8th donation), Erich K.
$20 (8th donation), Zile
$20 (7th donation), Joseph G.
$20 (6th donation), J. S. .
$20 (6th donation), John P.
$20 (4th donation), Brian C.
$20 (4th donation), Bruce C.
$20 (4th donation), Daniel B.
$20 (4th donation), Kevin Humphreys
$20 (4th donation), Leela A.
$20 (3rd donation), Logan Gartrell
$20 (3rd donation), Raymond T.
$20 (3rd donation), Sergio Arroyos
$20 (2nd donation), Andrew Y.
$20 (2nd donation), Cesar G.
$20 (2nd donation), David R.
$20 (2nd donation), Denise D.
$20 (2nd donation), Dirk S. aka “balkaninvest“
$20 (2nd donation), Greg L.
$20 (2nd donation), James B.
$20 (2nd donation), John M.
$20 (2nd donation), Joseph
$20 (2nd donation), Joshua S. aka “Better than Jeffrey H.”
$20 (2nd donation), Kevin D.
$20 (2nd donation), Lutz L.
$20 (2nd donation), Thomas M.
$20 (2nd donation), Ulf W.
$20, ALEKSANDR A.
$20, Allan G.
$20, Anthony R.
$20, Anthony R.
$20, Back Office Geeks
$20, Bill D.
$20, Brian D. O.
$20, Bruce L.
$20, DG
$20, Eddie N.
$20, Hans Z.
$20, Ingvar A.
$20, Jan I. L.
$20, Jared R.
$20, Jerred W.
$20, Joaquin H.
$20, Joe D.
$20, KENNETH D.
$20, Luke W.
$20, Michael H.
$20, Paul M.
$20, Randall W.
$20, Rigs by Russ
$20, Ron L.
$20, Sabrina F.
$20, Susan M.
$20, TAKAO Y.
$20, Tyler H.
$20, Văduva R.
$18 (5th donation), James H.
$16 (3rd donation), Bernd K.
$15 (5th donation), Harald H.
$15 (3rd donation), Balazs B.
$15 (3rd donation), Norberto C. N. aka “Konbini-San”
$15 (2nd donation), Jonas K. aka “Jonas”
$15, anonymous
$15, Gerald G. G.
$15, Jens-Peter G.
$15, Jesse D. K.
$15, Kevin Q.
$15, Stefano G.
$13, gino R.
$12 (2nd donation), Stibbon Leather
$11 (14th donation), Bengt Falke aka “Falke”
$11 (7th donation), Alessandro S.
$10 (111st donation), Thomas C.
$10 (55th donation), Philip Woodward
$10 (47th donation), Thomas R.
$10 (39th donation), Sami Mannila
$10 (38th donation), Tugaleres.com
$10 (35th donation), Denys G. aka “GD Next“
$10 (28th donation), Wilson G.
$10 (20th donation), Abdulkadir H. aka “Askari”
$10 (18th donation), Michael P. aka “www.perron.de“
$10 (17th donation), platypus products
$10 (15th donation), TONY aka “STRUZZIN ELECTRONICS“
$10 (13th donation), Axel R.
$10 (10th donation), JvdB
$10 (8th donation), Geoffrey P.
$10 (8th donation), Stefan S.
$10 (7th donation), Gene E.
$10 (7th donation), Tomasz K.
$10 (6th donation), Abe Z.
$10 (6th donation), Craig D.
$10 (6th donation), Günther H.
$10 (5th donation), Andrew I.
$10 (5th donation), Artem Ignatyev aka “ZaZooBred”
$10 (5th donation), Claudio A.
$10 (5th donation), Damir L.
$10 (5th donation), John B.
$10 (5th donation), Network Marketing Blog
$10 (5th donation), Stephen P.
$10 (4th donation), Evan M.
$10 (4th donation), Luc V.
$10 (4th donation), M.B.
$10 (3rd donation), Christoph V.
$10 (3rd donation), Claudio F.
$10 (3rd donation), Daniel W.
$10 (3rd donation), Heiko L.
$10 (3rd donation), Jeffrey S.
$10 (3rd donation), John T.
$10 (3rd donation), Lucie T. aka “shaolinlucie“
$10 (3rd donation), Matthias H.
$10 (3rd donation), Roel V. S.
$10 (3rd donation), Victoria J.
$10 (2nd donation), Armin V.
$10 (2nd donation), Cezar G.
$10 (2nd donation), Došlo R.
$10 (2nd donation), Frederik L.
$10 (2nd donation), Jivko R.
$10 (2nd donation), Kenton B.
$10 (2nd donation), kstevenson
$10 (2nd donation), Luka L.
$10 (2nd donation), Marco D.
$10 (2nd donation), Mariusz B.
$10 (2nd donation), Mohamed E.
$10 (2nd donation), Ramiro M.
$10 (2nd donation), Russell M.
$10 (2nd donation), Salvatore T.
$10 (2nd donation), SunBaked272
$10 (2nd donation), Tamas R.
$10 (2nd donation), Werner B.
$10 (2nd donation), Wes M.
$10, Vlad aka “UASK”
$10, A M.
$10, André S.
$10, Andreas O.
$10, Andrew S.
$10, Andy R.
$10, ANNA L
$10, Arthur U.
$10, Barry T.
$10, Beatrice B.
$10, Bernhard S.
$10, Brandon W.
$10, Carsten H.
$10, Celtia M. L.
$10, CHRISTIAN D. S. A.
$10, Christian R.
$10, Daniel I.
$10, Daniel P.
$10, Darold H.
$10, David B.
$10, david J.
$10, Denali W.
$10, Diego D. B. O.
$10, Diego V.
$10, DOMENICO A.
$10, Eduardo Maio
$10, Ferran T. B.
$10, Fredrik C.
$10, Giovanni R.
$10, Harold T.
$10, Heinrich V. V.
$10, hermann K.
$10, HOWARD S.
$10, Ingemar H.
$10, ion S.
$10, j.w. V. D.
$10, Jarod L.
$10, John C.
$10, Juan D. L. R.
$10, Kiril V. aka “Nidux“
$10, Kristian H. Sejersen
$10, Krzysztof P.
$10, Lucas F. J. B.
$10, ludovic T.
$10, Luka G.
$10, Marcel R.
$10, Marcio C.
$10, Marco K.
$10, Markus W.
$10, Matt N.
$10, Michael P.
$10, Pawe I.
$10, Pedro S.
$10, Rennie H.
$10, Ricardo P.
$10, richard F.
$10, ronald H.
$10, Sebastian S.
$10, Sergei D.
$10, Soeren
$10, Thorsten K.
$10, Volker R.
$10, Zachary H.
$8 (2nd donation), Özkan V.
$8, William G.
$232 from 60 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Patrons:

Linux Mint is proudly supported by 1,649 patrons, for a sum of $4,205 per month.

To become a Linux Mint patron, please visit https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint

Hello everyone,

Many thanks to our sponsors and to all of you who support the project with your donations.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in May:

A total of $15,377 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 501 donors:

$707 (6th donation), Daniel P. aka “Monkey”
$531 (4th donation), Andreas B.
$531 (2nd donation), Olli P.
$318, Laurent J. aka “Mad Rabbit”
$300 (6th donation), Keith M.
$212, alain B.
$200 (17th donation), Tomasz E.
$169 (8th donation), Wolfgang S.
$120 (2nd donation), Alexander K.
$120, Adrian E.
$106 (5th donation), Jiří B.
$106 (3rd donation), Elmar V.
$106 (3rd donation), F. S.
$106 (2nd donation), Jan M.
$106, Alexander L.
$106, Andreas F. M.
$106, Dieter O. B.
$106, Hans S.
$106, Jaakko M.
$105 (3rd donation), David L.
$100 (21st donation), John Mc aka “Land Research Project”
$100 (11th donation), Michael S.
$100 (7th donation), David T.
$100 (6th donation), Charles H.
$100 (3rd donation), Brady B.
$100 (3rd donation), Faisal Yousuf
$100 (2nd donation), Jason F.
$100, Antonio P.
$100, Herbert L.
$100, Mark A. M.
$100, Michael B.
$100, Michael L.
$95, peter A. W.
$84, Peter C.
$79 (2nd donation), J. S.
$79, Christian T.
$79, Sven S.
$65 (7th donation), Susan S.
$65, Waylon J. E.
$63, ANTHONY C.
$63, Mike W.
$60 (10th donation), Joe K.
$60, Karen P.
$53 (7th donation), Quim aka “slackjp”
$53 (5th donation), Johan P.
$53 (3rd donation), Daniel T.
$53 (2nd donation), Alexander S.
$53 (2nd donation), Andreas F.
$53 (2nd donation), Martin T.
$53 (2nd donation), Michael C.
$53 (2nd donation), Ron D.
$53 (2nd donation), Sebastian Friedrich
$53, Alexandre D. S.
$53, Andre B.
$53, Bastiaan S.
$53, Daniel F.
$53, Daniel G.
$53, Diedrich R.
$53, Ed G.
$53, Elmar R.
$53, Francis K.
$53, Georg H.
$53, Iulian D.
$53, Ivica B.
$53, Juha T.
$53, K D. B.
$53, Luis M.
$53, Marc J.
$53, Marek Stapff
$53, Olaf K.
$53, SALOME V. D.
$53, Thomas N.
$53, Tom D. C.
$53, TZer0
$53, Ursula C.
$53, vincent A.
$53, Vitalijus P.
$51 (21st donation), Adam K.
$50 (10th donation), Michael T.
$50 (9th donation), George M.
$50 (8th donation), Mothy
$50 (5th donation), Anthony C. aka “Ciak”
$50 (5th donation), Peter J, aka “Dr Peter”
$50 (3rd donation), Richard B. T.
$50 (2nd donation), Armin M.
$50 (2nd donation), Christopher M.
$50 (2nd donation), Douglas S.
$50 (2nd donation), Joshua D.
$50 (2nd donation), Nancy A.
$50, aka “Max”
$50, André L.
$50, Charles H.
$50, Derek N.
$50, Elwyn A.
$50, Giorgi Q.
$50, James C.
$50, Jay S.
$50, jeremy H.
$50, Johnny-Rico
$50, Joshua M. J.
$50, Katherine S.
$50, Kurt A.
$50, Kyle H.
$50, mark M.
$50, Martin B.
$50, Michael F.
$50, Michael M.
$50, Michael R.
$50, Radu Privantu
$50, Randall R.
$50, Sarosh P.
$50, seth H.
$50, Steven D. P.
$50, Valentin R.
$50, Youssef E. G.
$50, ZeSheng S.
$45 (6th donation), The W.
$44, Federico S.
$42, Albert S.
$39 (3rd donation), Neil M.
$35 (7th donation), P W E.
$35 (2nd donation), Robert L W.
$35, Rosaire D.
$35, THAPA S.
$31, Frode F.
$31, REGOJO M. aka “REGOM”
$31, Thorsten W.
$30 (11th donation), jowind
$30 (7th donation), Frank F.
$30 (3rd donation), Ron N. aka “TechNick”
$26, Achim S. thanks for LMDE
$26, Daniel Torkar
$26, Matei A. D.
$26, Nicole F.
$26, Tobias R.
$25 (51st donation), Linux Mint Sverige
$25 (10th donation), Mihnea Rădulescu
$25 (6th donation), John N.
$25 (2nd donation), Daniel W.
$25 (2nd donation), Marius V.
$25 (2nd donation), Sumanlal K.
$25, James A.
$25, John G.
$25, Kevin D.
$25, Kofi N
$25, Michael S. S.
$25, Rick L.
$24 (3rd donation), Cevad O.
$22, Oliver Ś.
$21 (107th donation), Johann J.
$21 (59th donation), Peter E.
$21 (28th donation), Denis D.
$21 (26th donation), Stefan W.
$21 (21st donation), Benjamin W. aka “UncleBens”
$21 (20th donation), Marek S.
$21 (13th donation), Hermann W.
$21 (9th donation), tenminutetechuk
$21 (8th donation), Rolf-Jürgen G.
$21 (8th donation), Thomas D.
$21 (6th donation), T.L. aka “T.L.”
$21 (5th donation), Jean-philippe P.
$21 (5th donation), Michele M.
$21 (5th donation), Mike E.
$21 (4th donation), Juan Francisco J.
$21 (4th donation), Lennart J.
$21 (4th donation), Ulrich J.
$21 (3rd donation), Curt S.
$21 (3rd donation), Gerard Gerritsen.
$21 (3rd donation), Luis M. M. I.
$21 (3rd donation), Marc C.
$21 (3rd donation), RAK
$21 (2nd donation),
$21 (2nd donation), András K.
$21 (2nd donation), Dietrich R.
$21 (2nd donation), Frank B.
$21 (2nd donation), J M. P.
$21 (2nd donation), Mateusz M.
$21 (2nd donation), Wolfram R.
$21, Ambrogio C.
$21, Andreas S.
$21, Andrés B. A.
$21, Andrew P.
$21, Axel T.
$21, Besnik N.
$21, Brian K.
$21, Catherine S.
$21, Daniele A.
$21, Darren M.
$21, Elmar D.
$21, ETIENNE G.
$21, Fave
$21, Florian B.
$21, Frank T.
$21, Garry W.
$21, Jan V.
$21, Joan S.
$21, John F.
$21, Kai G.
$21, Lucian U.
$21, Luciano P.
$21, Marc W.
$21, Marcel A.
$21, mario H.
$21, Martin S.
$21, Miriam K.
$21, nicolas D. R.
$21, Orthopedie Schmidt
$21, Paula B.
$21, Peter G.
$21, peter R.
$21, Robert H.
$21, sami L.
$21, Sander R.
$21, Steven D.
$21, Tautvydas B.
$21, Thomas J.
$21, Tobias E.
$21, Tycho V. W.
$21, Ulrich V.
$21, Volcan Media SpA
$21, Yann G.
$20 (68th donation), Bryan F.
$20 (52nd donation), Stefan M. H.
$20 (17th donation), Edward A.
$20 (15th donation), John W.
$20 (14th donation), Robert D. aka “MacDhai”
$20 (7th donation), Bezantnet, L.
$20 (6th donation), Hans G. H.
$20 (6th donation), Ingo P.
$20 (4th donation), Charles Edge in Memoriam
$20 (4th donation), Michael G.
$20 (4th donation), roger
$20 (3rd donation), Dan R.
$20 (3rd donation), Derrick G.
$20 (2nd donation), Joe V.
$20 (2nd donation), Kalib B.
$20 (2nd donation), Mehmet Y.
$20 (2nd donation), Michael N.
$20 (2nd donation), Roberto G.
$20 (2nd donation), William S.
$20, aaron S.
$20, Daniel B.
$20, David J. M.
$20, David P. Z.
$20, David R.
$20, Douglas A. H.
$20, Gabriel B.
$20, Gary S.
$20, Geoffrey C.
$20, Harlow M.
$20, Jacob K.
$20, Jose M.
$20, Justin S.
$20, Ken J.
$20, Ken R. B.
$20, Kourosh S.
$20, Larry A.
$20, Larry D.
$20, Melanie H.
$20, Peter S.
$20, Randall W.
$20, Randall W.
$20, Rob W.
$20, Samuel O.
$20, Stephen D.
$19, Andrew K.
$18 (2nd donation), Terry R.
$18, Duy N.
$15 (87th donation), Andreas S.
$15 (2nd donation), Alvin H.
$15 (2nd donation), Dieter S.
$15 (2nd donation), Jorgen Rhode
$15 (2nd donation), Lars Otto N.
$15 (2nd donation), Visa D.
$15, ItzPvPNinja
$15, Kosmischer
$15, Michel K.
$13, Jérémy M.
$12 (55th donation), Francois-R L.
$11 (6th donation), Alessandro S.
$11 (2nd donation), Marcus K.
$11, D J. C.
$11, Ovidiu I.
$10 (110th donation), Thomas C.
$10 (54th donation), Philip Woodward
$10 (37th donation), Tugaleres.com
$10 (34th donation), Denys G. aka “GD Next”
$10 (27th donation), Bruce M.
$10 (15th donation), Ronald S.
$10 (14th donation), TONY aka “STRUZZIN ELECTRONICS”
$10 (13th donation), Gabriele I.
$10 (12th donation), Dimitar S.
$10 (11th donation), redman
$10 (10th donation), Antoni Aloy Torrens
$10 (8th donation), Joerg B.
$10 (7th donation), Andrew D.
$10 (6th donation), Gene E.
$10 (6th donation), Sandu I.
$10 (5th donation), Abe Z.
$10 (5th donation), Conrad M.
$10 (5th donation), Craig D.
$10 (5th donation), Ja P.
$10 (5th donation), Peter S.
$10 (4th donation), Artem Ignatyev aka “ZaZooBred”
$10 (4th donation), Arvidas S.
$10 (4th donation), Benedikt R.
$10 (4th donation), Howard S.
$10 (4th donation), Jesús B. L.
$10 (4th donation), Michael S.
$10 (4th donation), Michel W.
$10 (3rd donation), Dietrich S.
$10 (3rd donation), Günter S.
$10 (3rd donation), Ingo H.
$10 (3rd donation), Michael O.
$10 (3rd donation), Rainer G.
$10 (3rd donation), Sonoda H.
$10 (3rd donation), Želimir S.
$10 (2nd donation), Alberto M.
$10 (2nd donation), André G.
$10 (2nd donation), Burkhard S.
$10 (2nd donation), Cameron S.
$10 (2nd donation), Dainius B.
$10 (2nd donation), Evie E.
$10 (2nd donation), Gordon William M.
$10 (2nd donation), Marco R.
$10 (2nd donation), Matthias H.
$10 (2nd donation), Norberto C. N. aka “Konbini-San”
$10 (2nd donation), Philip M.
$10 (2nd donation), Richard H.
$10 (2nd donation), Tomasz K. aka “mehimself”
$10 (2nd donation), Victoria J.
$10, A
$10, Abdi M.
$10, Adnan C. K.
$10, Advent Cleaners LLC (Al Phillips Cleaners)
$10, Aidan M.
$10, Alan H.
$10, alessandro T.
$10, Alexander B.
$10, Alfonso B.
$10, Alfonso C.
$10, Allan D. S. L.
$10, Andrea M.
$10, Andreas B. aka “AndreasFlowtMee”
$10, Andres G.
$10, Anton K.
$10, Aron B.
$10, ARTURO C. H.
$10, Benjamin A.
$10, Benjamin S.
$10, Bogdan M.
$10, Bruce Langan-Beardall
$10, Bryce S.
$10, Casca de copiat
$10, Claudio B.
$10, Collin C.
$10, Daniel M.
$10, David S.
$10, Dennis K.
$10, Dmytro Z.
$10, DUONG H. P.
$10, Emely G.
$10, Eric R.
$10, Ern B.
$10, Federico B.
$10, G%E9rard M.
$10, Gabe K.
$10, Gerald L.
$10, Giorgio C.
$10, Gispry
$10, Giuliana C.
$10, Gustavo F.
$10, Guy F.
$10, Harry B.
$10, Henrik C.
$10, HONG P. N.
$10, Ilia P.
$10, J%FCrgen K.
$10, James P.
$10, Jesus M. E. V.
$10, Joel C. T.
$10, Jonas K. aka “Jonas”
$10, Jonathan M aka “John Barbas”
$10, JOSE I. V.
$10, Jozef B.
$10, Juan D. A. B.
$10, Juan M.
$10, K Bidet
$10, Kevin L.
$10, KIANG K. S.
$10, Klaus K.
$10, Leon W.
$10, Levi G.
$10, Marco D.
$10, Mariusz B.
$10, Markus G.
$10, Martijn N.
$10, Mateusz L.
$10, Matevz P.
$10, Maurizio S.
$10, MAXIMILIANO G. B.
$10, Mehdi J.
$10, Miguel G. D.
$10, Moritz M.
$10, Moritz Q.
$10, Nikita B.
$10, Nikolay T.
$10, Omar A.
$10, Pawel P.
$10, Ragnar O. A.
$10, RAMON H.
$10, Reinhard V.
$10, Robbor
$10, Robert B.
$10, Robert H.
$10, Robert H.
$10, Roberto R.
$10, Rolf S.
$10, Ronald S.
$10, Samuel J.
$10, Sarah S.
$10, Sascha P.
$10, Sergio R. A. G.
$10, Shawn A.
$10, Stefan J.
$10, T.K. Info-Projekt d.o.o.
$10, Terje P.
$10, Themis T.
$10, Tobias H.
$10, Vardaan C.
$10, Wilhelm H.
$10, Wolfgang S.
$10, 何源
$7 (2nd donation), Brock A.
$238 from 64 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Patrons:

Linux Mint is proudly supported by 1,649 patrons, for a sum of $4,205 per month.

To become a Linux Mint patron, please visit https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint

Good software needs good documentation. But how do we define “good” in this sense? And what does the future hold? Find out in episode 4 of the LibreOffice Podcast! (This episode is also available on PeerTube.)

When different systems, applications or organisations need to communicate with each other and actually understand what is being said, interoperability is key. It enables a hospital’s software to communicate with an insurance company, for example, or one vendor’s inventory system to synchronise with another’s logistics platform.

At the heart of many of these data exchanges is XML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) may not be new or flashy, but it remains one of the most powerful tools for achieving reliable, structured interoperability across diverse platforms.

Why is interoperability so hard?

Systems are built using different programming languages, data models and communication protocols. Without a shared format or structure, exchanging data can result in a complex web of custom APIs, ad hoc conversions, and manual adjustments.

To get systems working together seamlessly, you need:

• A standardised structure for data.
• A way to validate that structure.
• A format that is language-agnostic and platform-neutral.

XML ticks all these boxes.

How XML enables interoperability

1. Self-describing structure

XML uses tags to clearly label data:

<customer>
   <name>Maria Ortega</name>
   <id>87234</id>
</customer>

This means that a receiving system doesn’t have to guess what each field means, as it is explicitly defined. This reduces the risk of misinterpretation and supports automated parsing.

2. Schema validation

Using XSD (XML Schema Definition) or DTD (Document Type Definition), you can define the rules that an XML document must adhere to, such as which elements are required, which data types are valid and what the structure must be.

This is critical for:

• verifying incoming data
• preventing malformed or incomplete exchanges
• ensuring consistency across multiple systems

3. Namespaces for avoiding collisions

XML namespaces prevent tag name conflicts when data from different sources is combined.

<doc xmlns:h=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/” xmlns:f=”http://www.w3schools.com/furniture”>
   <h:table>…</h:table>
   <f:table>…</f:table>
</doc>

Without namespaces, systems could misinterpret elements with the same name but different meanings.

4. Cross-platform compatibility

XML is plain text. Any system that can read a file can read it, whether it’s written in Java, .NET, Python or COBOL. This makes it ideal for long-term data exchange and integration between legacy and modern systems.

XML in real-world interoperability

Healthcare: HL7 CDA/FHIR

Hospitals, clinics, insurance providers and pharmacies rely on XML-based formats to exchange clinical records, billing data and prescriptions. HL7’s CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) is a strict XML schema that is used worldwide.

In government, XML is used for e-government forms and tax data.

Tax filings, business registrations and compliance documents are often submitted in XML format. This ensures consistent structure across various jurisdictions and software vendors.

Publishing: DITA and JATS

XML standards are used for modular content creation and journal publishing to allow interoperability between authors, editors, publishers, and archive systems, even if they are using different tools.

Finance: XBRL

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) uses XML to standardise financial reports, enabling regulators, investors and analysts to automatically process and compare data from thousands of companies.

Summary

Interoperability isn’t just about convenience. It’s about accuracy, consistency and trust. XML’s rigidity helps to enforce that trust.

XML may not be trendy, but it remains the backbone of system-to-system interoperability. Its structured format, validation tools and long track record make it essential wherever precision and compatibility are non-negotiable.

If your systems need to communicate reliably and seamlessly across platforms, XML is one of the best languages they can use.

Following the example of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice, the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation is doing the same.

Caroline Stage Olsen, the country’s Digitalisation Minister, plans to move half of the employees to LibreOffice over the summer, and if all goes as expected, the entire Ministry will be free from Microsoft Office/365 later in the year.

In a LinkedIn post, Olsen summarised the reasons for switching to LibreOffice:

We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely. Because far too much public digital infrastructure is today tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable. Also financially.

That is why we are now testing in parallel at the Ministry of Digitization how it works in practice when we work with open source solutions. Several municipalities are doing the same.

Not because we think it’s easy – but because we know it’s necessary to lead the way if we want to create more competition and innovation – and reduce our dependence on the few.

We in the LibreOffice project welcome this move, and look forward to seeing more governments and organisations getting control of their digital sovereignty and using public money for public code.

In my last article, I mentioned XML several times, perhaps assuming that all users had a basic understanding of it. Rereading it, I realised that an introduction to XML was needed for non-technical users, those who use XML every day without realising it, when they open a document, check the weather, place or receive an order online, or issue a digital invoice. XML works silently behind the scenes.

But what exactly is XML and why should it matter to non-techies? I will try to explain it in simple terms.

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, a way of organising information in a format that is easy for both people and computers to understand, helping different applications communicate and exchange data using a common language. Put simply, XML is a digital container that clearly labels information.

For example, this is a shopping list in XML format:


<groceryList>
  <item>
    <name>Bread</name>
    <quantity>1 loaf</quantity>
  </item>
  <item>
    <name>Milk</name>
    <quantity>2 litres</quantity>
  </item>
</groceryList>


Labelling helps computers and software understand exactly what each piece of information means.

In a hyperconnected world like ours, where apps and systems share data, XML allows that data to move between very different systems, such as credit card management apps and online shops. Without a common language like XML, communication between these systems would be much more complicated and slower, or even impossible.

So, XML is integrated into most everyday activities, even though it is completely hidden from users:

• All documents created by all office suites use XML, in some cases to facilitate transparency and interoperability, and in other cases to create a hidden layer of complexity with the aim of preventing transparency and interoperability.
• All apps that provide weather forecasts obtain updates by reading XML data issued by weather agencies.
• Almost all e-commerce applications use XML to manage communication between the website, the payment system, the bank and the shipping service.
• All blogs and news sites use XML to automatically transmit new content to readers.

XML is clear and easy to read because it organises data in an orderly manner with labels that are understandable to both humans and computers; it is flexible, as it is not limited to a single type of information and can be customised for different scenarios, from cooking recipes to flight schedules; and it is compatible with all platforms.

To appreciate the value of XML, you don’t need to have a deep understanding of the language, just know that it exists and that – when used properly, as in the case of the ODF format – it has the potential to help users achieve and protect their digital sovereignty.

Of course, it is equally important to know that XML can be used in exactly the opposite way, as is the case with Microsoft 365’s OOXML format (and previously Office), to limit users’ digital sovereignty and perpetuate lock-in through artificial file complexity.

In summary, XML is a silent enabler that ensures that users’ apps, services and data all speak the same language.

The next time you open a document, check your favourite news site or follow an online delivery, remember that XML is working silently behind the scenes to ensure that everything runs smoothly. And try to imagine a digital world without XML, where a single company controls the data and, through it, the users.

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

• We started the month with Episode 3 of the LibreOffice Podcast – this time looking at Quality Assurance (QA) in Free and Open Source Software. Watch it below – or on PeerTube.

• Then we announced the winners in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2025, providing information on how to get sticker packs. We’ve been sending out stickers and merchandise in the last few weeks, with a bit more to come!

• On June 6, we announced LibreOffice 25.2.4, the fourth minor update to our latest stable branch. All users are recommended to upgrade.

• Next, we posted another section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report, “LibreOffice for End User Privacy”.

• The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it’s time to consider Linux and LibreOffice! That’s the message behind the “End of 10” campaign, which we’re supporting.

• In the middle of the month, we posted news about a new tutorial added to the wiki, showing how to create colour wheels with LibreOffice.

• Throughout June, we posted various articles about ODF, the Open Document Format used by LibreOffice (and supported in many other office suites): An Analysis of the adoption of the Open Document Format; Understanding ODF compliance and interoperability; and A technical dive into ODF.

• Then we reported back from an event: LibreOffice at the Linux Arena in Pordenone, Italy.

• Before LibreOffice there was OpenOffice, and before OpenOffice there was StarOffice. And how was StarOffice developed? We talked to Stefan Soyka, who worked on the suite in the early ’90s, and has some entertaining stories to tell

• New LibreOffice merchandise is here! We updated our Spreadshirt shop with new designs and many extra items. Buy something and support LibreOffice – some of the proceeds go back to the project!

• Registration is now open for the LibreOffice Conference 2025. Join us from 4 – 6 September in Budapest – we’ll have technical talks, workshops, social events and more…

• And finally, we announced the new LibreOffice 25.2 user guides – awesome work from the documentation team.

Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better!

The LibreOffice community has great news: the Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Math User Guides are now available for version 25.2!

Yes, you read that right! With every new LibreOffice release, our Documentation Team works hard to keep up — and this time, we’ve shortened the gap between the software launch and the guides’ publication even more.

These user guides are the ultimate reference for anyone using LibreOffice — whether at home, at work, or at school. From spreadsheets to presentations, from text documents to complex equations: it’s all covered, clearly and accessibly.

The work is 100% community-driven! Jean Weber led the Writer guide, Peter Schofield coordinated the Impress, Draw, and Math guides, and Olivier Hallot headed the Calc guide.

Big thanks also to Dione Maddern, Celia Palacios, Ed Olson, B. Antonio F., Mike Kaganski, and Vasudev Narayanan for their valuable contributions.

Each new edition is more than just an update — it’s a chance to improve clarity, add the latest features, and deliver the best experience possible for end users. These guides complement the built-in LibreOffice Help and are perfect for deepening your knowledge.

The guides are available now for free download in PDF, ODT (OpenDocument format), and HTML (for online reading). And soon, you’ll be able to order printed copies via LuLu Inc.

Get your guides now:

• documentation.libreoffice.org
• books.libreoffice.org

Artwork: Eliane Domingos

Registration is now open for the LibreOffice Conference 2025! Join us from 4 – 6 September in Budapest We’ll have technical talks, workshops, social events and more…

Click here to learn more, and register

To write this article, I went beyond the limits of my technical knowledge, which is that of an advanced user who has studied standard formats and their characteristics in depth, to understand why standard formats – one of the pillars of digital sovereignty – and proprietary formats – their opposite, and one of the biggest obstacles to digital sovereignty – are not perceived as a problem by most PC users, who continue to use Microsoft’s proprietary formats and place the access and availability of their content in the hands of the US company.

To try to remedy this problem, I will try to explain as simply as possible, using non-technical language (which may shock developers, but this article is not aimed at them), some technical features of the Open Document Format (ODF), which make it the cornerstone of an open and vendor-independent ecosystem for office documents, defending the digital freedoms of all users and the governance of their content.

I will begin by explaining how to unpack an ODF file, which is nothing more than a set of XML files and other files (for images and videos) contained within a ZIP folder, in order to examine its internal components and, in particular, the content.xml file, which is the one that contains the body of the document (i.e., the user’s intellectual property).

The aim is not so much to assess conformity (compliance with specifications) and interoperability (the ability to exchange files consistently between tools), as these aspects will always be dealt with by specialists, but rather to understand the advantages for the user of the open and standard format over the closed and proprietary format (which is falsely standard, since it was approved by ISO/IEC in defiance of “their” definitions of standards).

For this reason, I will make a brief concluding digression on the characteristics of the OOXML (Office Open XML) format used by Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365, again to clarify to users the risks they face and the harm they do to themselves and other users when they use DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats, as well as the ‘gift’ they are giving to Microsoft, to whom they are effectively entrusting the management and future of their content.

Analysing an ODF file

Take any document you have created with LibreOffice. For convenience, I recommend starting with a text document created with LibreOffice Writer, with the ODT extension. Before doing anything else, duplicate the file, because an error in the procedure could make it unreadable, and move the original to another folder.

Rename the copy, replacing the ODT extension with the ZIP extension, without deleting the dot. The file icon will become that of a compressed file. If it becomes white or empty, you have done something wrong or deleted the dot. Check all the steps until the icon becomes that of a compressed file.

At this point, right-click on the icon and select “unzip” or “expand” to extract the contents of the compressed file into a folder with the same name as the file without the extension.

The folder will contain the following items:

• the META-INF folder, which will contain the manifest.xml file
• the Thumbnails folder, which may contain the thumbnail.png file
• the content.xml file, which contains the body of the document
• the styles.xml file, which contains the style definitions
• the meta.xml file, which contains the file metadata (author, creation date, last modification date, etc.)
• the settings.xml file, which contains the application settings

Each XML file within an ODF document must comply with the RelaxNG XML schema, or REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation, created by OASIS in 2001 and 2002, which is simpler – and therefore more accessible to non-technical users – than other XML schemas. The packaging rules are defined by the OpenDocument Packaging specifications.

In addition to schema validation, it must meet a number of conditions.

• Structural compliance: the elements of the ZIP and manifest.xml files
• Functionality compliance: all standard and optional functionality (metadata, styles, tables, graphics, etc.)
• Formula compliance: spreadsheet formulas must be compatible with OpenFormula semantics
• Security compliance: ODF profiles, encryption, digital signature

The manifest.xml file contained in the META-INF folder must list all the files in the ZIP file, with their media type:

<manifest:manifest xmlns:manifest=”urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:manifest:1.0″>
     <manifest:file-entry manifest:full-path=”/” manifest:media-type=”application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text”/>
     <manifest:file-entry manifest:full-path=”content.xml” manifest:media-type=”text/xml”/>
     <manifest:file-entry manifest:full-path=”styles.xml” manifest:media-type=”text/xml”/>
     <!– thumbnails, settings, etc. –>
</manifest:manifest>

Simply omitting a file or making an error in the description of its media type is enough to make the ODF file structurally non-compliant.

ODF: the importance of the content.xml file

To understand the user benefits of an open standard format such as ODF over a proprietary format, even one that is theoretically open such as OOXML, a quick analysis of the content.xml file of ODF files and its equivalent in OOXML files, which differs depending on the file type (and this alone is a sign that the development of OOXML did not take user needs into account at all, but focused on artificially increasing complexity), is sufficient.

Let’s take a first example, based on one of the most famous phrases in the history of world literature, namely “to be, or not to be, that is the question” uttered by the protagonist of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The content.xml file of a text document containing only this sentence is 32 lines long: the first 18 provide references to all the standards used (such as X-Forms and MathML), list the fonts used in the document styles, and define the styles (in this case only one, given the length of the text and the absence of formatting).

The next 13 lines are as follows:

<office:body>
     <office:text>
          <office:forms form:automatic-focus=”false” form:apply-design-mode=”false”/>
          <text:sequence-decls>
               <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level=”0″ text:name=”Illustration”/>
               <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level=”0″ text:name=”Table”/>
               <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level=”0″ text:name=”Text”/>
               <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level=”0″ text:name=”Drawing”/>
               <text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level=”0″ text:name=”Figure”/>
          </text:sequence-decls>
          <text:p text:style-name=”P1″>To be, or not to be, that is the question</text:p>
     </office:text>
</office:body>

The first lines define the body of the document and the fact that it is a text. The following lines are declarations that, in this case, do not add anything, but in other contexts would provide information about other elements of the document.

The key line is this: <text:p text:style-name=‘P1’>To be, or not to be, that is the question</text:p>, which defines a paragraph, declares its style (P1) and provides the content: To be, or not to be, that is the question. Clear and readable by any user, who now has the keys to access the document and manage its contents, i.e. the product of their brain.

Of course, more complex documents and contents would correspond to a more complex content.xml file, but always respecting the readability of the contents and the simplicity of the XML schema.

OOXML: what happens inside the file

Let’s see what happens in the case of the same document saved in DOCX format, closed and proprietary, and artificially complex. The file is called document.xml and not content.xml, and this – obviously – would not be significant if it were not a further sign of the complexity of the format, given that in the case of Excel the file is called workbook.xml and in the case of PowerPoint it is called slide1.xml, and so on.

The document.xml file of a text document containing only the phrase “To be, or not to be, that is the question” is 41 lines long: the first provides references to all the proprietary elements used (such as wordprocessingCanvas, VML and WordML), and all the subsequent lines relate to the content:

<w:body>
     <w:p xmlns:wp14=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2010/wordml” wp14:paraId=”2DC08235″ wp14:textId=”776AF5CB”>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t xml:space=”preserve”>To be, or </w:t>
          </w:r>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t>not</w:t>
          </w:r>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t xml:space=”preserve”> to be, </w:t>
          </w:r>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t>that</w:t>
          </w:r>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t xml:space=”preserve”> </w:t>
          </w:r>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t>is</w:t>
          </w:r>
          <w:r w:rsidR=”6B254FF6″>
               <w:rPr/>
               <w:t xml:space=”preserve”> the question</w:t>
          </w:r>
     </w:p>
     <w:sectPr>
          <w:pgSz w:w=”11906″ w:h=”16838″ w:orient=”portrait”/>
          <w:pgMar w:top=”1440″ w:right=”1440″ w:bottom=”1440″ w:left=”1440″ w:header=”720″ w:footer=”720″ w:gutter=”0″/>
          <w:cols w:space=”720″/>
          <w:docGrid w:linePitch=”360″/>
     </w:sectPr>
</w:body>

Obscure and unreadable. I challenge any user to reconstruct a text of any complexity from an XML document like this, if the original file is damaged. In the case of ODF, we were able to reconstruct even documents of hundreds of pages, or presentations of dozens of slides, because the content was readable by any user, even non-technical ones.

Let’s try to imagine the size of the content.xml file and the document.xml file if, instead of Prince Hamlet’s sentence, there were all 5,566 lines of the entire tragedy, in the original version written by William Shakespeare. In this case, the difference speaks for itself: content.xml is 5,598 lines long (32 lines more than the text), document.xml is 93,289 lines long (87,723 lines more than the text).

File complexity as the new lock-in strategy

This file complexity is intentionally hidden from the user, who sees a normal-looking document on the screen and has no idea that they are writing a file on their hard drive or in the cloud that has characteristics very similar to those of the proprietary files used in the last century, which are unreadable without the software with which they were written.

A user who believes they have made significant progress in terms of digital sovereignty because they use a format they believe to be open and standard but which, on the contrary, is even worse than the binary formats of the 1900s – which were nothing more than the writing of what was in memory – because, being based on XML, it is the offspring of an algorithm that can be modified remotely with a routine update (as happens in reality, where the same document is written in DOCX format but with a completely different XML syntax each time, based on parameters known only to the vendor, i.e. Microsoft).

So, it is an even more closed and proprietary format than the binary formats it replaced in 2006. The latter, being the result of writing what was in memory to files, were predictable and could be emulated, while OOXML is unpredictable due to the algorithm, and therefore almost impossible to emulate without constant study of its many evolutions.

OOXML is a theoretically open and standard format, which in reality is closed and proprietary, and represents the latest evolution of the lock-in strategy that underpins all Microsoft products for individual productivity, defending an estimated turnover of over $25 billion per year, with an estimated net profit of over $20 billion per year (all figures are estimates, as analysts’ figures are no longer available and are probably lower than the actual figures).

Perhaps the time has come for supranational organisations, central and local governments, and probably also individual users, to open their eyes and take a simple step forward towards digital sovereignty, i.e. the governance of documents and their content independent of the commercial choices of a single company, by adopting ODF and abandoning OOXML.

A few years ago, we had started a series of interviews (mitch and schumaml). More were planned, but things don’t always go as planned.

Well let’s try again! Today we are interviewing Sevenix, the digital artist who contributed the very cool splash screen image (which appears when starting GIMP) for the GIMP 3.0 series.

This interview was held asynchronously and remotely with questions from myself, Liam Quin and Alx Sa.

Wilber (GIMP team): Hello Sevenix! Could you introduce yourself?

Sevenix: Hello! My name is Fredrik Persson and I’m a programmer located in Sweden in my late thirties. I like music, movies and video games with the latter being one of my major points of artistic inspiration. Most of my drawings, even if not necessarily related to a specific game, take a lot of inspirations from the games I enjoy. One game in specific was actually the reason I got into digital artwork at all.

W: You use GIMP for illustrations. Is this a hobby? Do you use GIMP for a living?

S: I use GIMP for a lot of things but my main use would probably be creating illustrations, or digital artwork, yes. Ever since I was little I enjoyed drawing vast landscapes and simply filling them to the brim with little details. I use GIMP as a hobby, and while I have taken commission works earlier, I tend to not these days. The way I work is rather slow and heavily dependent on my inspiration over several months. Taking on projects that are not based on my own inspiration as well as demanding deadlines, it was simply not an enjoyable experience for me.

W: Could you talk a bit about your workflow please?

S: Funny thing, most who read this would probably expect me to be good at drawing, but truth is, I’m really not. I would consider myself below mediocre when it comes to real life drawing. I’ve always had the will and compulsion to draw, but I was never really any good at it. As such, I belong to a rather small minority who produce my artwork, not with a drawing tablet and pen, but with keyboard and mouse.

W: You work with fairly large images - what sizes are typical, and do you need to do anything special in your workflow to handle them?

S: Since I work with digital art, my main focus has always been to create wallpapers for desktops. As such I started off making regular 16:9 images in 1920x1080 pixels (HD) which during the later years I have increased to 3840x2160 (UHD). That being said, this resolution and aspect ratio is only my final aim. Sometimes websites etc. will use some different aspect ratio which I would have to adhere to, and I found it easier to create my work with this in mind from the start, rather than try to add more to the image afterwards. Print on Demand sites like Displate for example create prints in a 1.4:1 ratio. So, the first parts of all my work is to create an image that would fit a Displate 1.4:1 print. My next step is to immediately make sure to add guides or framing to make sure I do most of my detail work inside the areas which will later become the 16:9 wallpaper. This way I get a resulting image that is a 16:9 wallpaper, but with the option to extend the image to a 1.4:1 without having to create anything new.

W: You told us that you only use a mouse (no graphics tablet). Why is that?

S: One of the major advantages with digital work compared to conventional is that you can undo steps. Whenever I need to draw a line or arc, I can literally have infinite amount of attempts to get it just right. I try once and see if I’m happy with the result, if not, I do a quick Undo and try again. I mentioned that I’m bad at actual drawing and ever since I came to accept that I’ve started considering the work I do less of “drawing”, and more of “Brute Forcing Pixels”.

I believe using a graphic tablet could be great if you like it and it’s a skill you already have, but I equally believe that achieving a similar skill and familiarity with a mouse isn’t much harder. I suppose an answer to this question in it’s simplest form would be: I do my work with keyboard and mouse, because it’s how I learned to do it and it’s what I feel comfortable with.

W: Your art uses a rather specific art style, could you tell us a bit about it?

S: I can try. The way I got into actual art was trying to replicate the art of the game Fallen London. They use rather simple shapes, fog and lights. Creating more of a Silhouette of their objects rather than actually drawing them. They also tend to use images with very few colors, which is also something I’ve taken with me. This way I was able to create expansive landscapes by placing layer after layer on top of each other. This results in an image that is hard to describe digitally but when people ask I tend to describe it as a Digital Paper Diorama, which I find very apt.

The way I tend to work consists of really just a few techniques, repeated for each of my “layers”

1. I Create a new Layer Group and name it with a number. This layer group will contain everything I need for one segment of my image.
2. I draw my silhouetted landscape on a layer in this group, this is my Base layer.
3. I add a linear gradient ontop of the base layer and make it apply to only the layer below it by setting the clipping option of the layer to Clip to Background.
4. I add another layer group inside the layer group. This one I name “Lights”. It consists of a base layer as well which are the shapes. but in order to easily be able to change the color of these lights I make another layer ontop of it and naming it Color, similarly setting it to only apply to the Lights layer below it. Once I feel satisfied with this layer I duplicate it and run a Gaussian Blur on it, making it create a glow bloom on the light sources.

I replicate this Group Layer structure for each of the “layers” I need in my images. I usually end up with around 10 to 20 of these groups in my images. And while the above list is the base of them, many become more advanced as I need things added.

What’s important to me with this structure is the fact that it’s very easy to go back to it and edit it. At any point in my workflow I want to be able to determine that “This part here on layer 3 doesn’t really work with this great tree placement on layer 13”. At those points I don’t want there to be anything to stop me from going back to Layer 3 and change it to how I need it to be.

As I see it, the more non-destructive editing I do, the less I become tied down to decisions I made 10 hours back in my workflow.

This does create some rather large files, but as long as my computer can handle it I feel it’s a crucial part of my workflow.

Just for an example, the latest piece I did was a piece related to Remedy Entertainments Alan Wake games. The whole project took some 15h of work time and ended up with some 170 individual layers.

W: Is there any of your illustrations that hold a special place in your mind?

S: There are many, I could pick a lot out of my early work that were the point where I felt like I was actually happy with my results, and eager to show them off. But instead I will pick a piece I named Land of the Cherry Blossoms.

This was probably the first real piece I did that was not simply based on other works. Up to this point I had made most my work by trying to replicate styles, testing out techniques and basing it on already existing lore. This piece was the first time I made something that felt like it was me putting something on the canvas that was all me.

There are a lot of inspirations in this piece of course. A classic Japanese setting in pink with Sakura trees are in no way mind-bending. But it was mine, straight out of my head, and piled on with all the thousands of small details I like adding to my work.

This was also one of my first pieces to become really popular on Print on Demand sites, providing me with visions of a potential future where I could actually do this for a job.

All of this. The positive feedback, the actual small amounts of money it brought in, not to mention the joy I felt with creating it, really put this piece as one of the most impactful of my digital artist career.

W: What do you think of the latest GIMP 3 series?

S: I really like it! There were some issues in the very earliest releases but they were fixed fast and I now moved over to using 3.0 for my regular, daily work. It looks much more modern to start, but what really wins me over are some long awaited features such as non-destructive editing.

W: Any specific feature in 3.0 that caught you by surprise?

S: Multi-layer selection. When I first heard about it being added to GIMP I had no idea how perfectly it would fit into my workflow. The ability to save selections allow me to easily select all of my “color” layers of the color I want to replace, then simply fill them all with my new color.

In the old workflow I had to change one layer first, then click every other layer one by one, repeating the same action on each of them. Even providing I was happy with the end result, this was still some 20 or 30 actions I had to do manually.

In 3.0 I can do all that in just 4 actions!

W: What are your favorite features or main reasons why you appreciate GIMP?

S: I enjoy the fact that it is open source and free. I say that as someone who would never have gotten into image editing or digital art unless I would have been able to simply download it and start trying.

W: What are the features you really wished GIMP had, or things you’d like to see improved or changed?

I’ve been using the 2.10 version since I started with digital art, and as such there was always the continuous rumors about a 3.0 version arriving sometime in the far future. It wasn’t till I actually got into the GIMP community that I realized that the 3.0 version really didn’t seem that far off at all. Ever since then I’ve followed the development and believe it or not, just about everything I wished for seems to be implemented in 3.0. Multi-layer select, Non-destructive editing. Just such a simple thing as the decision to change the default Paste functionality from the very beginner hostile Paste as Floating Layer was great.

There are of course things that still can improve, and definitely things I could see myself using if they were implemented. And if you forced me to mention one I think it would be something similar to Adobes Smart Objects. Being able to add another GIMP image into your current GIMP image.

W: Apart from contributing to the project with illustrations, you also help with moderation on Discord. Could you talk about it?

S: I was very happy when I found the Discord. GIMP is an advanced program and in that it can be very hard to navigate when you are new. Joining the community on Discord allowed me access to a quick way to throw out “stupid” questions whenever I got stuck. Issues that would usually provide me with enough frustration to simply stand up and walk away from my computer suddenly just took a quick question in a chat channel, a cool head, and some patience.

As for the moderation. I’m a person who enjoy finding things I like doing. And as I get better at them, I really enjoy helping others find that same joy.

In GIMP, most of the time when you get stuck it’s usually because of 2 or 3 common issues. Maybe you got a checkbox active that you shouldn’t. Maybe you accidentally set your layer to 0% opacity. Maybe you happened to set the Mode of your brush to Screen.

In either of those cases, you learn each time you figure it out. And with some help that goes much faster. As soon as I had gotten stuck enough times, I was able to help answer literally half the questions that were asked in the Discord channel. And people were always so appreciative. Most of the times those that get help there also end up posting the results of their work a bit later, and it’s awesome to know we were part of making that happen.

I say We because I’m in no way alone in this. While I was later promoted to a moderation role in the discord, the moderation itself has always been quite easy. What really impressed me is how popular the Discord server has become. These days it’s frequented by so many people that you hardly got a chance to answer questions unless you literally pounce at them the moment they appear.

My work as a moderator is a very easy one, all thanks to the absolute amazing community in there that crave to help others, improve their own work, or show off their latest creative works.

W: Any closing remarks for this interview?

S: Thanks for picking me for this. As I mentioned earlier, I love talking about and sharing my passions. Combining not only Digital Art but the general history and development of GIMP into the same interview could literally have me talking for ages.

---

A few links to know more about this artist:

• Sevenix’ DeviantArt page
• Buying prints from Sevenix

---

Bonus: here is the alternative banner version of the GIMP 3.0 splash image, also contributed by Sevenix for irregular promotion of the software on the Microsoft Store (it is designed so that it can be cropped for various form factors and with space left on the left for the software’s name and some additional text):

Get cool LibreOffice merchandise – and support our projects and community! We’ve updated our Spreadshirt shop with new designs, and part of the sales go to The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the suite.

Click here to visit the shop

In keeping with our new release schedule, we’re proud to announce GIMP 3.1.2, the first development version of what will become GIMP 3.2! This release contains a number of new features that we’ve been working on in-between bugfixes for GIMP 3.0. We’re looking forward to your testing and feedback as we continue adjusting and tweaking the code and design of them.

Our new development splash screen was created by Ville Pätsi and commemorates our recent visit to the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting

Note that a development release is not ready for production use. It might crash. If it didn’t have problems it would be 3.2 already. So please do test, but understand this is a feature release for early adopters and for the more adventurous!

Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette¶

Brush previews in GIMP are printed on a white background. For grayscale brushes, we use black to represent the brush stroke. Since the Brush dockable displays many brush previews side by side, it can create a distractingly bright section if you’re using the Dark or Gray themes, especially in grid mode.

We now have a toggle to make brush previews rendered with the theme foreground and background colors instead. This means that in dark mode, the brush background will be a darker color while the brush itself will be lighter. The fonts dockable also has this toggle, and palette displays will automatically use the theme colors. Note that this is a cosmetic change only and does not affect how you create brushes.

Default Colors	Theme Colors

Brush preview before and after theme color toggle - GIMP 3.1.2

Auto-match Windows and Linux OS theme¶

GIMP defaults to the Dark mode version of our Default theme on first load. Thanks to the hard work of several contributors (Hari Rana, Niels De Graef, Isopod, and Jehan), we know have an additional “System Colors” color scheme so that GIMP matches your current OS theme preferences on Windows and Linux (provided your OS supports the portal). GIMP’s theme will also automatically update if you change your system preference.

You can of course still explicitly set a color scheme in Preferences or the Welcome Dialog if you’d prefer to use a scheme that’s different from your OS.

If you’re a macOS developer and are interested in adding support for this feature on your platform, please reach out!

New Paint Mode: Overwrite¶

New contributor Woynert implemented a new paint blend mode called Overwrite. It allows you to directly replace the pixels over the area you paint, without blending the transparency values of the brush and the existing pixels in that area.

This new mode is particularly useful for pixel art, when you want to overwrite your target opacity over the source opacity, and is mostly targetted at the Pencil tool. With the brush tool or other paint tools, some interpolation of opacity and color will still happen for softer transitions as this is what is usually expected with these tools.

For these non-pencil use cases, we are still tweaking the algorithm and we welcome feedback. For the pencil tool use cases though, the sharp overwrite of color and alpha is pretty much what is expected from this mode.

Note also that this new mode is only available as a paint mode (in particular, you won’t find it in the list of layer modes or effect modes).

New Text Outline Option¶

There’s a new setting in the text tool to control the direction of the text outline. You can have the text outline grow inward, outward, or in both directions!

Non-destructive editing¶

Co-Maintainer Michael Natterer spent several days during the Libre Graphics Meeting, going over the non-destructive filter code in order to clean it up and refactor it. While this is mostly behind-the-scenes work, this should reduce bugs and make future development and maintenance much easier.

Building on this work, GIMP now supports adding non-destructive filters to channels! The Channels dockable now shows the same Fx column as the Layers dockable, so you can edit, rearrange, delete, and merge filters on channels just like you can with layers.

CMYK¶

The CMYK Color Selector now calculates and displays the Total Ink Coverage of the selected color. This is useful when printing, as depending on the printing system and the media used, there may be a limit on how much ink can be applied.

File format support¶

We have added support for several new formats and improved some existing ones. Are there image formats you need? Let us know and we can investigate whether we can add them.

ART Raw Loader¶

We’re adding support for using ART (AnotherRawTherapee) as a Camera Raw loader in GIMP, in addition to our existing support for darktable and RawTherapee. If you have ART already installed, GIMP should automatically recognize it and use it to load Camera Raw format images for further editing. If that doesn’t work for you, please reach out and let us know!

Krita Palette¶

By request, we’ve added a new option to export to Krita‘s .kpl palette format from GIMP. You can do this by choosing Export as from the menu in the Palette dockable.

Photoshop Patterns¶

Jacob Boerema has added support for importing Photoshop patterns! You can put Adobe .pat files in the GIMP pattern folder and automatically load them in the same way as GIMP’s own .pat files. We have tested this feature with RGB and grayscale Photoshop patterns, but if you run into any issues with your patterns, please let us know (and include the pattern file)!

Photoshop Curves and Levels presets¶

You can now use presets from Photoshop’s Curves and Levels filters in GIMP’s Curves and Levels filters! When you use these filters, choose Import Current Settings from File... from the Preset menu and select your .acv or .alv preset respectively. If your preset doesn’t work with those filters, please let us know (and include the preset files)!

PSD/PSB¶

Alx Sa has implemented initial support for exporting PSBs, Photoshop Large format. It is very similar to PSDs - the main difference is that you can export images up to 300,000 pixels wide and tall instead of PSD’s 30,000 limit. Thanks to Ville Pätsi for their initial testing. If you work with very large images (or PSBs in general), we’d appreciate your testing and feedback!

Also, our PSD/PSB importer now recognizes legacy Drop Shadow and Inner Shadow non-destructive filters. These will be converted to GIMP’s non-destructive Dropshadow filter so you can edit and adjust them after opening the image.

APNG¶

GIMP can now import APNG animations. People building or packaging GIMP should note that we used the standard libpng for this, not a patched version, so no changes are needed.

OpenEXR¶

We’ve now added support for loading multi-layer OpenEXR images. For instance, if you export a multi-view image from other software such as Blender, all views should show up in GIMP as individual layers.

JPEG 2000¶

We have had import support for JPEG 2000 images for many years. Steve Williams of Advance Software implemented an export plug-in for their own use and shared a GIMP 3 compatible version with us. We have merged it into the existing JPEG 2000 loader, so now you can both import and export JPEG 2000 images!

Playstation TIM¶

Andrew Kieschnick originally developed a GIMP 2 plug-in to load and export Sony Playstation 1 TIM textures and images. We have updated the code to be compatible with GIMP 3 and incorporated it as a standard image plug-in.

OpenRaster¶

OpenRaster is a file format intended to help share layered images between graphics editors (such Krita, MyPaint, and Scribus). In addition to the standard format (which GIMP already supports), there are two official extensions to remember which layers were selected and which ones were content locked. GIMP now supports exporting and importing both.

Over The Air Bitmap¶

We’ve added import support for Nokia’s historical black and white Over-the-Air Bitmap format. (Hey, ImageMagick supports it too!)

Jeff’s Image Format¶

As promised in our April news post, we have added import support for the GIF variant known as Jeff’s Image Format (.jif).

AVCI and HEJ2¶

Daniel Novomeský has added support for importing Advanced Video Coding (AVCI) still images. They’ve also added support for exporting HEJ2 images, which is an HEIF file that contains a JPEG 2000 image.

UX/UI¶

Denis Rangelov, Reju, Michal Vašut, and other designers have been working on a number of UX/UI updates for GIMP 3.2 in the UX repository. While the larger changes are still being designed and reviewed, we have been implementing several of their quality of life fixes:

• We found several instances where the Foreground Selection algorithm would run when switching to another tool, even if no selection had been made yet. This caused an unnecessary lag, so we adjusted the algorithm to avoid running in those cases.

• A few more areas where the system theme could conflict with GIMP’s theme were found and fixed. In fact, a few of these glitches were found while taking screenshots for this news post!

• The Palette dockable now automatically selects the next swatch when you delete a previous one, allowing you to quickly delete several swatches by just clicking the Delete button repeatedly.

• The state of the “Merge Filter” checkbox for non-destructive filters should no longer be affected if you apply a filter that currently has to be destructive, like Lens Blur. In prior versions, applying a destructive filter would always enable the checkbox for other filters, even if you had turned it off before.

• “Lock pixels” now generates an undo step in undo history, just like “Lock Position” and other locks.

Notable bug and regression fixes¶

Unique Color Count¶

The Color Cube Analysis plug-in was removed from GIMP 3, as most of its functionality already exists in the Histogram dockable. We say most, because one feature was missed - the display of how many unique colors the image has. Thankfully, Google Summer of Code student Gabriele Barbero has reimplemented this feature! You can enable it by checking “Compute unique colors” in the Histogram dockable. The count will update live as you edit the image.

Additional Fixes¶

Some image formats do not allow images to have transparent sections. This can be confusing if you’re not familiar with all the details of the image you imported, especially when rotating or applying a filter with transparency such as Color to Alpha. We now detect if a filter or transformation would require transparency, and automatically add an alpha channel to the layer to prevent unexpected distortions.

Jacob Boerema implemented a fix for ZDI-CAN-25082, which potentially affected loading certain DDS images on a 32-bit machine.

In the 3.0.4 news post, we implemented a fix for transparency padding when pasting a selection to other programs. Cheesequake extended this fix to also cover copy and pasting full layers to other programs. Please let us know if you notice any other related regressions!

Estecka fixed a bug where editing filters on a hidden layer would automatically cause the layer to reappear.

The legacy Jigsaw filter has been updated to work on transparent layers. While it’s not a non-destructive filter, this fix should allow you to apply it to a separate transparent layer and then use it as an overlay for your image.

Plug-in/Script Developers¶

We’ve added a new API to create a GimpCoordinates widget in the auto-generated dialogue. gimp_procedure_dialog_get_coordinates () will connect two numeric parameters with a chain link and a unit type dropdown. You can see an example of how it’s used in our Tile plug-in, or in our GimpUi API documentation.

Due to an oversight, unsigned integer parameters did not generate widgets in GimpProcedureDialog despite being functionally this same. This has been corrected, so now gimp_procedure_add_uint_argument () will create input fields automatically just like gimp_procedure_add_int_argument () does.

Also, Jehan added a new default behavior to the GimpChoice parameter type. If you make one with only two options, the auto-generated dialog will display radio buttons instead of a dropdown menu. You can of course override this default with gimp_procedure_dialog_get_widget (), but we think this will help save people some clicks for simple options.

Build Process¶

Bruno Lopes continues their hard work to improve our build and packaging processes. A few of the highlights:

• Our build system now automatically generates a list of image formats that GIMP can open on Windows. This means rather than manually maintaining (and often forgetting to update) a list, the installer and MSIX will associate all supported images as we implement them, like the ones mentioned in this news.

• Our Linux builds now have a similar method of auto-generating image format associations via their mimetype too. We hope to implement this feature for macOS builds as well in a future update.

• All previously non-portable build scripts of GIMP repository have been made POSIX-compliant. This means that it’s now easier to use these on platforms like BSD. Bruno has also implemented more checks in our CI pipelines to prevent non-portable code from being reintroduced in the future. Even though most of these utility scripts will not be used on daily basis by packagers (we ported the important .sh scripts used by Meson to .py scripts since GIMP 3.0.4 development cycle), this makes our builds truly cross-platform.

Release stats¶

Since GIMP 3.0.4, in the main GIMP repository:

• 42 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 55 merge requests were merged.
• 302 commits were pushed.
• 12 translations were updated: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Dutch, Galician, Georgian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

29 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.1.2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 14 developers to core code: Jehan, Michael Natterer, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Bruno Lopes, Christoph Reiter, Estecka, Gabriele Barbero, Hari Rana, Ondřej Míchal, Philip Zander, cheesequake, lloyd konneker, woynert.
• 9 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jehan, lloyd konneker, Jacob Boerema, Advance Software, Anders Jonsson, Daniel Novomeský, Natanael Copa.
• 12 translators: Luming Zh, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Ekaterine Papava, Alexander Shopov, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Nathan Follens, Anders Jonsson, Danial Behzadi, Emin Tufan Çetin, Jordi Mas, Yago Raña.
• 1 theme designers: Alx Sa.
• 2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes.
• 11 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, lloyd konneker, Jehan, Advance Software, Christoph Reiter, Michael Natterer, Natanael Copa, Sam James, woynert, Ondřej Míchal

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• Our UX tracker had 3 reports closed as FIXED.
• ctx had 186 commits since 3.0.4 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind Kolås.
• gimp-data had 10 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Ville Pätsi, Alx Sa.
• The gimp-test-images (unit testing repository) repository had 2 commits by 1 contributor: Jacob Boerema.
• The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 18 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes.
• The flatpak release had 7 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 26 commits by 3 contributors: Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes.
• Our developer website had 20 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Lloyd Konneker, Jehan.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 40 commits by 9 contributors: Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alevtina Karashokova, Nathan Follens, Jacob Boerema, Alx Sa, Matthew Leach, Alevtina, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan.

Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!

Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions.

Team news¶

Our Google Summer of Code students are making great progress with their summer projects!

Gabriele Barbero is making some much-requested improvements to our on-canvas text editor. In their test branch, they’ve made the style editor moveable, and each text layer remembers its editor’s position when you switch between them. With a little more polish and bug-testing, this feature should show up in a future 3.1 development release!

Ondřej Míchal has created a GEGL Filter Browser prototype in their own test branch. This involved a lot of research, as there any a number of edge cases and formats to account for. When finished, this feature will be very useful for script and plug-in developers, especially with the new filter API that lets them create and apply any effect available in GIMP!

Shivam is working on a website to list and display third-party GIMP extensions (the rebirth of the GIMP registry that older creators may have known). A first version of the script to generate extensions’ web pages from their metadata has already been merged.

Around GIMP¶

We printed stickers of the new Wilber logos for the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting.

You can use this file if you’d like to print your own Wilber stickers. You can also request reimbursement if you’re planning to print enough to hand out at a local event or GIMP User Group meeting. Note that we are still working out the procedure for these requests, but we encourage you to reach out and discuss your idea.

Downloading GIMP 3.1.2¶

You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

• Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Linux flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit)
• Microsoft Store package for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware
• macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware

Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc.).

There is no development release for the manual, but you can continue to use the existing GIMP 3.0 documentation from GIMP 3.1.

What’s next¶

This first development release contains many new features we’ve been working on during 3.0 development. Our main focus for GIMP 3.2 on the roadmap is developing two new types of non-destructive layers - linked layers and vector layers. We hope to share more information about these in future news posts.

This faster pace release schedule also proves to be quite stimulating and relies on years of infrastructure and procedure preparations. So far, it looks like it works quite well!

While we remind that this is a development version and therefore we advise against using it for production, we also really welcome feedback and bug reports. At every first stable release in a new series, too many bugs are discovered. GIMP is a community, first and foremost. The software will improve because many people participate! Now that we are starting the development releases for a brand new stable series, we are really relying on everyone so that the upcoming GIMP 3.2 can be as stable and good as possible.

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

The Open Document Format (ODF) is an open standard format for office documents, which offers a vendor-independent, royalty-free way to encode text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
However, to realise its potential, it is necessary to understand the concepts of compliance – the degree to which an implementation adheres to ODF specifications – and interoperability – the ability to exchange and view ODF files without loss of fidelity or functionality across different applications and platforms.

ODF is an XML-based file format that has been standardised by OASIS and ratified by ISO/IEC 26300. Milestones include:

• ODF 1.0 (2006): the initial version defining the basic document types: text (.odt), spreadsheet (.ods) and presentation (.odp).
• ODF 1.1 (2012): updates to formula specifications and accessibility improvements were made, but it was never submitted for standardisation.
• ODF 1.2 (2015): introduces digital signatures, RDF metadata, and OpenFormula for standardising spreadsheet calculations.
• ODF 1.3 (2020): an extension of security features, including improvements to encryption and import/export conventions, as well as a clarification of compliance clauses.

Each version has strengthened the role of ODF as a universal interchange format, ensuring that documents remain readable and editable in all programs, both now and in the future.

Definition of compliance

Compliance refers to the extent to which a given software implements the ODF standard. It comprises several levels:

1. Structural compliance: ensures that file archives contain the expected XML files (e.g. content.xml, styles.xml and meta.xml), in accordance with the ODF Packaging specifications.
2. Schema validation: verifies that the XML content matches the applicable ODF schemas (Relax NG or W3C XML Schema). This prevents a <draw:image> element, for example, from appearing where only text is permitted.
3. FeatuSecurity profilesre compliance: supports the required features (styles, tables, charts and metadata) and the correct implementation of the optional features required by the application (digital signatures, encryption and change tracking).
4. Formula compliance: for spreadsheets, adherence to OpenFormula specification ensures that formulas behave consistently across different applications.
5. Compliance statements and profiles: applications often declare their compliance levels (e.g. ODF 1.2 Part 1: OpenDocument Schema). Some define profiles, which are subsets of the full standard tailored to specific industries or workflows.

Non-compliant files risk becoming unreadable or displaying incorrectly in other applications. Validating ODF schemas and integrating compliance tools enables developers and users to guarantee the longevity and accuracy of documents.

The interoperability landscape

Even when two applications claim ODF compliance, disparities can arise.

• Rendering differences: variations in character substitution, line spacing or image placement can slightly alter the layout.
• Functionality differences: for example, an editor may support digital signatures, but implement them in a way that causes signatures to be rejected when files are exchanged.
• Use of extensions: some applications use proprietary extensions (e.g. custom XML blocks) that others do not recognise, which can result in data or content loss.
• Metadata management: different handling of document properties, such as author, version history or custom metadata, can hinder workflows.

To achieve strong interoperability, systematic testing is required.

1. Automated schema validation: tools such as ODF Validator can check thousands of files against ODF schemas in batches.
2. Feature compliance suites: OASIS provides test suites that cover every aspect of the ODF specification, including basic document elements and encryption profiles.
3. Round-trip testing: save a document in application A, open it in application B and save it again, then reopen it in application A to detect any differences.
4. Visual regression testing: use headless rendering engines (e.g. LibreOffice in server mode) to generate PDFs or bitmaps for pixel-level comparison.
5. Community reports: projects such as ODF Plugfest bring vendors together to exchange test files and submit interoperability reports.

Best practices for ensuring compliance and interoperability:

1. Adherence to the core standard: avoid proprietary extensions unless they form part of an agreed ODF profile.
2. Early and frequent validation: integrate schema and conformance testing into CI/CD pipelines for document-centric applications.
3. Prioritise OpenFormula: when creating a spreadsheet, use standard functions and avoid vendor-specific formula syntax.
4. Adopt the Flat ODF format: the Flat ODF format (.fodt, .fods and .fodp) stores the entire document in a single XML file, making it easier to compare, validate and process in scripts.
5. Document compliance statements: indicate the ODF version supported by the application, as well as the schema, encryption and signature parts.
6. Participate in plugfests and community testing: real-world feedback is valuable, so it is important to participate in interoperability events and contribute to public issue trackers.
7. Make smart use of metadata: use ODF metadata elements (e.g. dc:meta, RDF blocks) to ensure the consistency of document properties when transferring between tools.

Looking ahead: ODF 1.4 and beyond

Although ODF 1.3 has addressed many functional issues, the ecosystem continues to evolve.

• Accessibility improvements: better support for tagged PDFs, ARIA roles and semantic markup.
• Native cloud editing: harmonisation of ODF with collaborative protocols (e.g. WOPI and CMIS) to enable real-time co-authoring.
• Extended multimedia management: richer multimedia support is incorporated (e.g. video and embedded web components), while maintaining interoperability.
• Security profiles: standardisation of profiles for high-security environments (e.g. government or healthcare), combining encryption, signatures and content redaction.

Conclusion

ODF compliance and interoperability are fundamental to document longevity, workflow resilience, and user trust. By adhering to ODF schemas, testing across multiple applications and adopting community best practices, organisations can safeguard their content against vendor lock-in and format degradation. As it continues to mature, ODF is set to remain the foundation of open, accessible and durable office documents.

LibreOffice is the successor project to OpenOffice(.org), which in turn was based on StarOffice, a proprietary office suite developed in the 1990s. Learn more about the history here! And let’s hear from Stefan Soyka, who worked on StarOffice from 1990 – 1992…

When did you join Star Division, and what did you work on?

I came from Berlin to Hamburg to work for Marco Börries in his Star Lab in spring 1990, together with my friend and study mate Stefan. Both of us joined the project more or less at the same time and shared the same first name, which caused some confusion at first.

The situation in Hamburg needs some explaining if you are new to it. The Writer application that is the foundation of what we use today is not the first Star Writer – but thesedays it is often referred to as Star Writer 6 or Star Writer Graphic. Marco’s company Star Division, based in rural Lüneburg not far from Hamburg, had developed and sold with considerable success a text processing application with the same name, that was an MS-DOS application based on a home-grown graphics framework. A team of freelance programmers was working on it under the lead of Sven-Ola Tücke.

This was also the tool we used to write the first drafts for specifications, by the way.

The old Star Writer had a solid fanbase and sold quite well even after Star Lab started in Hamburg. So it is fair to say that the money we burned in Hamburg was earned in Lüneburg.

Marco, however, had the right feeling that graphical user interfaces were already around and taking up speed. The future (that is the time we live in now) would belong to applications running on the main graphical user interface platforms at this time, being Microsoft Windows, the X Window System and macOS. Of course there were voices that argued that graphical user interfaces were only hampering productivity and real pros would always use the command line. That may sound a bit funny today, but I took it all in my heart.

When I arrived there, development had pretty much advanced in the compatibility layer named Star View, that allowed portable programming of both operating system functions and graphical user interfaces. There was, however, no application yet. Because I had worked on a C++/X Window System project on the ODA standard (ISO 8613, Open Document Architecture), I had some background on this and formed with some others the core of the Star Writer project team.

Tell us about the office location and team back then!

The offices of Star Lab at that time were at Heidenkampsweg, near Berliner Tor, in Hamburg in a quite modern building. I remember the adjacent gas station; many of us were heavy cigarette-smokers at that time, and I sometimes went there at night to get the next pack.

Dirk Bartels supervised the daily operations. He had a software company back in Berlin and he expected benefits from the Star View portability layer for his own products. His personal secretary was Marita, if I remember the name correctly, a lovely young woman, I think the only one in the project at that time. When I joined the team, there were about twenty people working there including administrative staff.

Andreas, a good-natured guy with intense freckles, managed the Star View project. Almost all the coding however, at least for the Microsoft platform, was completed by Thomas – a very young man who was incredibly well-organized and productive, the type of coder who writes a screen full of statements that compile instantly error-free. He also virtually lived in the offices. The staffing for this platform was good; the other platforms had fewer developers. I remember Dirk, a shy young man who did the Macintosh port. One day, he showed us that all output appeared like upside down. It turned out that the Macintosh uses a y-origin different from the Microsoft platform (top left, I think). That gave him certainly some headaches.

Michael, a freelancer from Lüneburg, sometimes visited Star Lab in his tiny, first generation Mazda MX-5, that he could barely fit into. He was the only engineer who contributed to both the “classic” Star Writer with Sven-Ola Tücke, and Star Lab. He introduced the first Star Basic macro language. For the Windows platform, it had been worth thinking about a Star Writer application programmers interface or component object model (OLE at that time, but was just emerging in 1991 with Word and Excel), but with portability above all, this did not come to pass.

The team at this time was Euro-centric at least – effectively most staff members came from nearby. Another great developer in the Star View team, however, was Eddy McGreal, an Irish guy, whom I saw by incidence recently in a software product presentation he held. Can’t stop hacking.

Armin kept the business in order. He was also working on internationalisation. When he married, he invited all mates to comes and celebrate. It was in a small town in the moors, I don’t remember the name, but we had a great time. When we went back to Hamburg in the morning – hopefully at least the driver was more or less sober.

In the Star Writer team, Jürgen was the most productive programmer, about two meters tall with a sad face. Playing handball was his first priority, if he was not hacking. He did incredible work under the hood, like importing exotic files from other text processors, and never complained or missed a deadline. I think we never gave him enough credit for what he achieved.

Despite all the good work, the Star Writer project did not meet the expectations in the time when I was there. Later, I spent many thoughts on why we were not more successful in the beginning, because it felt like a wasted opportunity to me. It was not for the lack of ambition: there are folders full of splendid concepts and intricate specifications. But none of us had a good blueprint of the best way to start this enormous, complex task, I believe.

What was the toolset and development process like back then?

The object-oriented programming paradigm had evolved into the first C++ standard and implementations. Before I came to Hamburg, a pre-compiler was used, on Sun Workstations at least, to generate standard K&R C code, that was fed into the platform native C-compiler. The result was not always predictable or free of errors, but luckily, at Star Division, we had the one-step Microsoft C++ compiler, so we were a step ahead at this point.

Star View, however, was a huge library and the Microsoft linker had a hard time (and needed a long time) to do the static linking. When it came to a code freeze, that is the integration of the stable versions of all projects, Stefan used an egg timer so that he didn’t miss the time when the linker had finished, to see if there were problems with the linking or not. It took so long, you could easily forget it. If it failed, it needed fixes and another round. The whole process needed much time, until Stefan one day found out that someone had tackled the problem with the Microsoft linker and had released a better implementation that did the job in a fraction of the time.

Another paradigm that came up at the time was the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. It says, in short: what you see is only a volatile transformation of the model. The controller, like someone typing text into the application or a report generator producing table data output into a document, changes the model, which in turn from time to time updates the view.

Many in the project and even in the management were not comfortable with this procedure, because it appeared to make a simple thing unnecessarily complex. The argument was like: “This is meant to be a WYSIWYG text processor, and we need nothing beyond what the user sees on the screen, so let’s store this”. Nobody wanted to look at a document any different from before, when he or she opened it again – maybe on a different machine were fonts were missing or the display had a different resolution. There was a lot to explain and no proof that either concept was superior. What’s more, nobody could tell reliably and by their own experience, what adopting the MVC pattern for a text processing application meant in practice, and how the code would look like.

Then, the Unicode standard was evolving and a controversial debate started about what that meant for our plans. Speaking of 16-bit Unicode only, two aspects were unsettling: the same document would need twice the memory compared to 8-bit characters (we had no concept for memory management then and kept the whole document in RAM all the time, which obviously still needed some reworking). At that time, the model was using zero-terminated C strings for text paragraphs for the comfort of using the standard C string libraries.

Turning to Unicode, we would have to say goodbye to that and rewrite the functions we needed. It probably had not yet dawned everyone, that C strings would not suit the requirements of text attributes and formatting anyway.

UTF-8 strings, on the other hand had the downside that it was complicated to find out, how many character positions the output would use. Building substrings from UTF-8 strings is also a delicate matter, because the string can not be cut at any position without creating invalid UTF-8 character sequences.

Most of the developers working on StarOffice later will certainly be surprised, what basic considerations were moving us at the start, but man, this was all serious stuff.

StarWriter 3.1 (screenshot courtesy of WinWorld) and modern LibreOffice

Do you still use LibreOffice today, and do you have any contact with old Star Division team members?

Sorry to say that I have no contact any more with my has-been workmates. I left Star Division somewhat frustrated because it took so long for the good concepts to materialize and also, because I felt, I was not the right man to promote that. But I also had a pregnant girlfriend (now my wife) in Berlin, which was even a better reason to say good-bye.

Frankly, I was relieved and amazed to see the first product. It was not free at that time. I don’t think it really paid for Marco before it went to Sun Microsystems – anyway there was no free download. With my Zyxel 14.400 baud modem, it had taken a long time anyway. I got versions on batches of CDs from time to time from my friend Stefan, though, who was still with the project.

I was not so happy with the application at first, because at that time it was a monolithic “desktop” with all applications in its belly (like Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw, I believe), which took ages on my machine to load. I would have loved to see more collaboration in it: at that time that would meant an e-mail client and calendar.

Sometimes I thought to myself, “If I had to decide …” but ended with a sigh :“There would be no Star Writer to this very day”. In fact, it would be another interesting story, which changes it took to finally make it happen.

I never had Microsoft Office for myself (I like Microsoft Publisher for the themes and the artwork that came bundled with it, but somehow Pokémon Druckstudio was an acceptable replacement). I had to buy a Microsoft licence for my children though, because teachers did not expect that someone would not have access to Microsoft Office, and I was hesitant to end my child’s learning career over this.

I use LibreOffice almost every day now. It has all I need, and probably much more.

I use LibreOffice for my everyday correspondence, and less often I use it to create PDF files for printing. I have a nice set of Star Basic macros, and a good document template I load all the formatting from, to create a good-looking A5 format book from a text file or a website, in no time at all. Creating PDF files is very easy in LibreOffice, yet it has some uncommon features that come in very handy at times, like the option to export also blank pages (that would usually be omitted). Believe me, you don’t want to go to print without the blank pages.

The E-books that I create from the same document (printing is a bit out of fashion) have no frills (they could have, of course) but they are nice to read. I confess that I find it very convenient to load them into my Kindle account, from which I can read them on any device that comes near to me.

Well, I’m not a young man anymore, I like to say that before anyone else does, and programming to empower users (with more luck in later projects) is still my passion to this day. The StarOffice project has been with me more or (sometimes) less all the way, a bit like a child I gave up for adoption at an early age.

TDF says: Thanks to Stefan for the insights into the early days of StarOffice – and we’re happy to hear that he’s still using LibreOffice today!

Marco Marega writes:

Hi, I’m Marco, an Italian translator and Member of The Document Foundation. Twice a year I take part in an event in Pordenone to promote LibreOffice within the stand “Linux Arena” of the PNLUG Linux User Group. It’s inside a local fair, part of which is dedicated to technology, makers, electronics and so on.

For the event from April 25 – 27 we had a LibreOffice stand with a 32″ monitor, showing an Impress presentation about LibreOffice on a loop. At the stand I met different interested people – some of whom I already know since they visit the fair regularly, while others I saw for the first time.

There is always curiosity about LibreOffice, and this time I noticed an increasing demand about AI integration and related plugins. The LibreOffice coffee/beer mats were very much appreciated by visitors to the stand.

The Pordenone Linux User Group invited other associations to share the stand, so there were also:

• Trieste Linux Users Group, with a nice game to learn bash commands while trying to deactivate a bomb
• Odoo group, presenting the ERP/CRM/…
• Bergamo Linux Users group presenting OpenWRT and some other projects (Emiliano Vavassori is one of them)
• A Blender expert
• Another member who uses openSUSE for multimedia production
• A corner where volunteers helped visitors to install Linux on their PCs, or to solve little problems

The next edition of the event will be on 22 – 23 November.

🌐 Translations

• Updated Turkish translation using Weblate by @weblate in commit
• Updated Hungarian translation using Weblate by @summoner001 in commit
• Updated Italian translation using Weblate by @Wiccio in #804

Over the course of its 20-year history, the ODF standard has been adopted, or at least recommended, by numerous supranational bodies and several countries on almost every continent. However, this does not necessarily mean that the ODF standard is used in accordance with these decisions, which are often laws in their own right, as Microsoft’s substantial lobbying and misinformation campaigns aimed at protecting its revenue of around $25 billion generated by the proprietary OOXML format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) encourage the use of the latter. This is despite the fact that the disadvantages for national systems, communities of citizens and individuals are very easy to demonstrate: loss of control over content, interoperability problems and dependence on the commercial strategies of a single vendor.

The information in this post is based on my research into sources relating to the adoption or recommendations for the use of ODF. I began compiling this collection of documents around 2010 and continue to update it annually. Over the last twelve months, I have also used artificial intelligence in my research, which has helped me find some articles.

Unfortunately, formal adoption or recommendation of ODF does not guarantee its actual use in accordance with the law. For example, the latest version of Italy’s Digital Administration Code explicitly prohibits the use of OOXML because it is not a standard, yet this decision is largely ignored by public bodies.

SOVEREIGN BODIES

NATO requires all 28 member countries to use ODF as the standard format for document exchange.

UN and NGOs: UN organisations favour standard and open formats to ensure that all documents remain accessible and do not depend on expensive or restricted tools. This is why ODF is used for reports, policy drafts, and collaborative documentation between teams.

European Commission: has taken a strong stance in favour of open standards and promotes the use of formats such as ODF in documents through its open source software strategy. The European Parliament, the European Commission and the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office) have integrated LibreOffice and ODF into their internal workflows to ensure greater transparency and language neutrality.

EUROPE

Belgium: Since September 2007, all Belgian federal government departments have been required to accept and read ODF documents, and a memorandum has established ODF as the standard for the exchange of office documents within the federal public administration.

Denmark: From 1 April 2011, the Danish Parliament has mandated the use of ODF by state authorities for the exchange and archiving of documents, whereas previously agencies were only required to accept ODF documents. In recent weeks, articles have claimed that the Danish government will formally migrate to open-source software and, therefore, to ODF. We are, of course, seeking confirmation of this project.

Finland: The Ministry of Justice and other ministries have adopted ODF as the main document format.

France: The Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité (RGI) recommends ODF as the preferred format for office documents in public administrations. Agencies are therefore encouraged to use ODF for creating and archiving text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Germany: The German Council for Information Technology Planning, representing the federal and state governments, has committed to making ODF the standard for document management in public administration by 2027. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and several federal courts already use ODF exclusively. Several federal states and municipalities have also switched to ODF-compatible office suites, such as LibreOffice and Collabora Online. ODF is cited as a core element of Schleswig-Holstein’s digital sovereignty strategy.

Italy: The Digital Administration Code only allows ODF in its guidelines for public administration, as OOXML does not meet the open standard criteria contained in the document’s glossary.

Netherlands: The Dutch government mandates the use of open standards, including ODF, for all data exchanges in the public sector, and adoption is monitored by an active political community that supports implementation.

Slovakia: All public authorities must be able to read and use ODF for electronic communication and publication of documents, including those with electronic signatures.

Spain (Andalusia and Extremadura): These regions require government agencies to use ODF (or PDF/A for static documents) for communication with each other and with citizens.

Switzerland: Government agencies are recommended to use ODF for document exchange with citizens or other agencies.

United Kingdom: In 2014, the British government adopted ODF as the sole standard for sharing and collaborating on editable documents across the public sector. The Home Office has a formal ODF adoption plan and does not reject ODF documents from citizens or businesses.

AMERICA

Argentina (Province of Misiones): The use of ODF is mandatory within government administrative organisations.

Brazil: Since 2010, proprietary formats have been prohibited in the federal public administration and ODF has been the standard for all office documents. It is mandatory in federal IT policies and is widely used in ministries and state governments. SERPRO (the federal data management service) ensures that national document workflows comply with the ODF standard.

Uruguay: public documents must use ODF for editable files and PDF for fillable forms and non-editable documents.

Venezuela: all federal government organisations must use ODF 1.0 for editable documents.

ASIA

India: India’s policy on the adoption of open standards for e-governance includes ODF as the preferred format for all federal and state services, particularly where vendor neutrality is critical for affordability and scalability.

Taiwan: The Ministry of Education has introduced ODF-compliant tools in all schools, and local governments use LibreOffice for daily administration.

AFRICA

South Africa: South Africa’s MIOS (Minimum Interoperability Standards) policy aims to ensure a future-proof digital government and access for all. It promotes open standards and lists ODF as an accepted format.

CASE STUDY

Monaco: In 2013, the city of Monaco made headlines when it migrated 15,000 desktops to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, adopting ODF. Despite positive results and significant cost savings, the project faced strong political opposition backed by the Microsoft lobby. In 2017, part of the migration was cancelled. This case is emblematic because it highlights the complexity of vendor lock-in and demonstrates the pressure that public institutions face from proprietary vendors to maintain a monopoly that is detrimental to the institutions themselves and their citizens.

Regina Henschel writes:

Susanne Mohn asked on the German-language user’s mailing list how to create a colour wheel with LibreOffice. It was not about the colours themselves, but about the geometry. How do you create a circle or ring with equally sized sectors?

Very different solutions were proposed. Susanne Mohn, Harald Berger and I (Regina Henschel) have created a page in the LibreOffice Wiki so that these do not remain hidden in a thread. Due to the development process, some sample files are in German, but the page itself is in English.

Colour wheels can be used to create “doughnut charts” of data. Have fun exploring!

https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/

Right after Inkscape Summit in Nuremberg, from May 28th to the 31st, the team attended to the Libre Graphics Meeting 2025, also in Nuremberg. It was a great opportunity to learn and share, and a unique experience to see how Inkscape contributes to the Libre Graphics scenario globally.

LGM 2025 featured a series of talks and workshops, covering aspects of creative software development, demoing real use cases for libre graphics, and pushing boundaries of technology as a platform for creative experimentation. From graphic design to embroidery stitching, XML editing to retro video game UI emulation, Inkscape showed up as an important part on the arts, design, and maker communities.

Ink/Stitch — Talk

https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/program/ink-stitch/
Daniel K. Schneider gave an excellent overview around embroidery stitching as a durable and versatile artistic expression, with many areas of application. All existing embroidery machinery use proprietary file formats and require expensive software. Ink/Stitch is an Inkscape extension that offers a full-fledged, cross-platform embroidery digitizing platform. It is based entirely on free and open-source software. In the past year, Ink/Stitch had 225 thousand downloads. It's user base have an active community of 10k+ french speaking users in a Facebook group.

Daniel mentioned that one of Inkscape's advantage for building Ink/Stitch is that it is already familiar to the makers community, from other activities (like laser cutting). Inkscape's drawing conventions can be used to define stitch types (a thick stroke translates to satin stitches, for example), which is interpreted and converted by Ink/Stitch into real embroidery patterns. It is super cool to see Ink/Stitch converting SVGs and simulating the output.

How to Run a Film Festival on Libre Graphics — Talk

https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/program/how_to_run_a_film_festival_on_libre_graphics/
Marc Rodrigues organized and ran the first LusOFest — Festival for Portuguese-Language Film in Offenbach am Main. Lusofest 2025 featured work from 6 countries and received 6 film makers. It's more than 350 visitors were able to attend to 3 feature films exhibitions and watch 40 out of 500+ submitted short films. As stated by Marc, "Organising a film festival is 90% communication". Marc covered the importance of advertising and rooting for people to come for your festival. All communication and promotional materials, were done entirely with FOSS. And as mentioned by Marc, Inkscape was the obvious choice for all the Graphic Design work, producing printed post cards, social media postings, and more.

Inkscape UI Vision Going Forward — Talk

https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/program/inkscape_ui_vision_going_forward/
UX designer Henrique Perticarati walked through the design process for an Inkscape UI vision work, and how this proposal gained traction with the community. Henrique proposes that a friendlier UI would be more inviting to new users, and a larger user base would lead to more contributions. He also pointed out that tools like Blender, GIMP and Scribus had recently gone through UI redesigns, and that there's momentum in the community for a UX-led transformation. This vision work helped Henrique to build trust with Inkscape's community and start collaborating with other members (Yotam Guttman, Wen-Wei Kao, Adam Belis, Mike Kowalski) around the future of Inkscape UX. During the talk, Henrique covered some insights about UX related users' interests, based on analysis of Gitlab issues. These insights will help determine further research and UI explorations. Stay tuned for news around the UX initiative!

CapyPDF — Lightning talk

https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/program/lightning_talks_thursday/
Jussi Pakkanen had a 10 min lightning talk about CapyPDF, a low level library for generating PDF files.
It exposes all PDF object specifications, nothing more, nothing less. CapyPDF is also the basis for the upcoming Inkscape CMYK-capable PDF exporter we've been all waiting for (our own Martin Owens is one of the project collaborators).

Other mentions to Inkscape

• Neil C Smith stated that Inkscape is his "favorite XML editor" in his excellent talk "Libre Designers and the Software Apocalypse". https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/program/libre_designers_and_the_software_apocalypse/
• In a lightning talk, Inkscape contributor Felipe Sanches showed how he uses Inkscape to create awesome retro UIs for MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/program/lightning_talks_friday/

After four days of exchanging knowledge and experiences with the community, we are excited about getting back to work!

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice support the international campaign @endof10 https://endof10.org/

The countdown has begun. On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10. This will leave millions of users and organisations with a difficult choice: should they upgrade to Windows 11, or completely rethink their work environment?

The good news? You don’t have to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

The real costs of switching to Windows 11

The move to Windows 11 isn’t just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.

This is a turning point. It is not just a milestone in a product’s life cycle. It is a crossroads.

The new path: Linux + LibreOffice

These two programmes form the backbone of a free and open computing environment based on open standards. For individual users, public administrations, schools and businesses, this combination offers more than enough: it is mature and secure, and is already in use worldwide for mission-critical workloads. Furthermore, using open standards protects users against any attempts by software developers to control them.

Here’s what this alternative offers:

1. A modern, stable and unrestricted operating system, accessible to all users thanks to intuitive distributions that allow each user to choose the configuration that best suits their needs. It also offers regular updates, long-term support versions and communities where people can help each other and develop their digital knowledge together.
   Unlike Windows 11, Linux works with all personal computers that ran Windows 10, meaning there is no need to replace your old PC. Those with even older computers can also find a suitable version of Linux, extending their useful life and reducing electronic waste.
2. LibreOffice is a complete office suite offering word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and database tools. It respects freedom and data because it is based on an open, standard document format (ODF), and is compatible with Microsoft’s proprietary formats (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). This gives users control, as Microsoft cannot decide to end support at any time, as it is doing with Windows 10.
   LibreOffice is supported by a global community of volunteers, consultants, and companies who provide free and paid professional support, ensuring the ongoing development of the software and the prompt resolution of security and operational issues. There are no licence fees, telemetry or vendor lock-in.
3. Both Linux and LibreOffice are based on transparency. This means that all documents saved in the standard format will always be available because the format is open, and all documentation is available online. They also do not require a user licence subscription that protects the software vendor more than the user, and which contains incomprehensible legal clauses.
   Both the operating system and the software are managed by foundations, not companies. All activities, including development, quality assurance, problem-solving and the release of new versions, take place in public because users have the right to control the quality of the digital tools they use and entrust with their content.

What does migration look like?

Replacing Windows and Microsoft Office is not as difficult as it seems, either at an individual or corporate level. Many organisations around the world have already done so, and many others are planning to do so right now, precisely because they no longer want to be subject to the commercial strategies of Microsoft and its partners.

These are the key steps:

1. Start by testing Linux and LibreOffice on a second partition of your PC (for individuals) or in less critical departments (for companies).
2. Check the compatibility of your software configuration with Linux and LibreOffice; most office tasks can easily be transferred or adapted with minimal effort.
3. Build documentation to learn how Linux and LibreOffice work and organise training if necessary.
4. Find a consultant who can help with the migration process, such as someone certified by the Linux Professional Institute or The Document Foundation (for LibreOffice).

This is not a radical change, but rather a gradual, tailor-made transition depending on user needs.

It is important to start immediately

Microsoft is forcing users’ hands, but it is also opening a door. Now is the time to challenge your assumptions and take back control of how your personal computers work, how long they last, and most importantly, how your content is managed.

Linux and LibreOffice are not just alternatives; they are superior choices that most users have not considered until now because they trusted Microsoft — perhaps too much. This trust has been betrayed by the decision to abandon a functioning operating system such as Windows 10, purely to sell more products and lock users in further, which cannot be justified by any technological assessment.

Here’s how to get started:

• Choose Linux: https://distrochooser.de/
• Try LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/
• Find events and support for Linux: https://endof10.org/

The end of Windows 10 does not mark the end of choice, but the beginning of a new era. If you are tired of mandatory updates, invasive changes, and being bound by the commercial choices of a single supplier, it is time for a change. Linux and LibreOffice are ready — 2025 is the right year to choose digital freedom!

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice support the international campaign @endof10 https://endof10.org/

LibreOffice stands out as a privacy-respecting open source office suite. Unlike proprietary alternatives, the software is designed with privacy, user control and transparency in mind.

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Introduction

Concerns about end user privacy in the digital world have grown significantly over the past two decades, with and increasing awareness of data collection, user tracking and online surveillance. Many proprietary applications, including office productivity tools, often collect vast amounts of user data, in most cases without clear user consent.

All this has been clearly documented by Shoshanna Zuboff in her book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which is defined as a new economic strategy that uses the activities and experience of the individual as a free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, profiling and selling.

In this context, open source software differs substantially because respect for the user and for privacy are part of the ethical principles that guide the development of all applications. And LibreOffice stands out as the only office suite – open source or not – that respects privacy. Unlike proprietary alternatives, LibreOffice is designed with privacy, transparency, and user control of content in mind. The software does not collect telemetry data by default, does not include intrusive tracking functions, and allows users to work completely offline.

The following is a list of LibreOffice features and settings which help ensure end-user privacy, making the software a preferred choice for individuals, businesses and government institutions that prioritise data security.

No data collection or telemetry by default

One of the most significant privacy benefits of LibreOffice is its lack of telemetry by default. Unlike proprietary office suites that constantly send usage data back to their developers, LibreOffice does not collect or send any personal data without the user’s consent.

1. There are no background processes that track document usage, keystrokes or user activity.
2. LibreOffice does not create a unique user ID or track document interactions like some proprietary office suites do.
3. There is no built-in cloud storage requirement, ensuring that files remain on the user’s device unless manually uploaded elsewhere.

Optional telemetry with user consent

LibreOffice offers an optional telemetry feature, but it is entirely opt-in and requires explicit user consent. The collected data will only be used to improve the functionality of the software and will never be shared with third parties.

Full offline functionality

Unlike cloud-based office suites such as Google Docs, Microsoft 365 or Apple iWork, LibreOffice is a fully offline suite.

1. No forced cloud storage: documents remain on the local computer, reducing the risk of unauthorised access.
2. No dependence on an Internet connection: users can work in completely isolated environments.
3. No third-party server involvement: documents are never stored on a corporate server unless explicitly uploaded by the user.

For security-conscious organisations such as government agencies, law firms and healthcare providers, this offline capability ensures that sensitive documents never leave the internal network.

Open Document Format (ODF) for privacy and transparency

LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format (ODF) as its default file format. Unlike proprietary formats such as Microsoft’s DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, ODF is an open standard, which means:

1. It does not contain hidden tracking elements or embedded metadata that can leak user information.
2. It guarantees the integrity of the data in the long term because the format is fully documented, and the documentation is publicly available. Furthermore, the documentation corresponds to the format currently used by the software, unlike what happens with Microsoft 365 where the documentation is stuck at 2008.
3. It does not contain proprietary encryption mechanisms that could be exploited for surveillance or unauthorised access.

Control over metadata

Metadata can contain sensitive information such as: author details, document history, and editing timestamps. LibreOffice allows users to remove all metadata before sharing a document to ensure that private information is not inadvertently shared with external parties.

Strong encryption and password protection

LibreOffice provides robust document encryption to prevent unauthorised access. Users can protect their documents with strong passwords and encryption settings. This prevents unauthorised users from opening or modifying the file.

In addition, LibreOffice supports GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) encryption for users who require public key cryptography to secure their documents.

No cloud lock-in: freedom to choose storage

Unlike Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, which force all users to store documents in their respective cloud ecosystems, LibreOffice allows full control over file storage. This flexibility ensures that no third party can access user data without explicit permission.

Users can:

1. Store files locally on their hard drive or external storage.
2. Use self-hosted cloud services such as Nextcloud or ownCloud for increased privacy.
3. Store files on USB drives, encrypted partitions or private network servers.

Macro security and malware protection

Macros are often used in office documents for automation, but they can also be exploited to deliver malware. LibreOffice includes robust macro security settings to protect users.

1. By default, LibreOffice blocks macros from untrusted sources.
2. Users can only enable macros if they are signed with a trusted certificate.
3. The security level can be configured to prevents malicious actors from using macros as an attack vector.

Transparency and open source code

One of the biggest privacy benefits of LibreOffice is its open source nature. Unlike proprietary office suites that operate as black boxes, LibreOffice’s source code is publicly available and regularly audited by the security community. This level of transparency and user control makes LibreOffice a trusted alternative to closed-source office suites.

1. No hidden spyware: because anyone can inspect the code, LibreOffice cannot contain hidden trackers or surveillance tools.
2. Independent security audits: governments, cybersecurity experts and researchers can verify LibreOffice’s privacy claims.
3. No forced updates: users have complete control over when and how they update LibreOffice, avoiding unwanted feature changes or telemetry settings.

Conclusion

LibreOffice is the most privacy-conscious office suites available today. With no telemetry by default, full offline functionality, strong encryption, metadata control and open source transparency, it provides users with a secure and private environment for document creation and collaboration.

For individuals, businesses and governments concerned about privacy and digital sovereignty, LibreOffice is a reliable, free and ethical alternative to proprietary office suites.

As privacy concerns continue to grow in the digital age, LibreOffice remains committed to ensuring that users retain full control over their data: a core principle that sets it apart from many commercial alternatives.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Hello everyone,

Many thanks to our sponsors and to all of you who support the project with your donations.

Mint 20.x EOL

It’s been 5 years already!

Linux Mint 20.x releases (i.e. 20, 20.1, 20.2 and 20.3) reached EOL (End of Life) and are no longer supported. They will continue to work but they will no longer receive security updates from the repositories.

If you’re running Mint 20.x, you have two main options:

– Fresh installation of Linux Mint 22.1 (recommended): This is supported until 2029 and is the cleanest approach – backup your data and do a fresh install.

– Upgrade path through Mint 21: This gets you support until 2027 and involves multiple steps:

• To upgrade 20, 20.1 or 20.2 towards 20.3 follow this tutorial: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4216
• To upgrade 20.3 to 21 follow this tutorial: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4378
• Optional: To upgrade 21 to 21.3 follow this tutorial: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4629

The minor upgrades towards 20.3 are quite simple, easy and fast. The upgrade from 20.3 to 21 on the other hand is a major upgrade. It is longer and more complicated. Take your time with this one and don’t hesitate to seek assistance within the community, in the chat room or on the forums.

For more information on upgrades visit https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade.html.

Fingerprint Authentication

Linux Mint 22.2 will feature a brand new app called “Fingwit“.

Fingwit is a fingerprint configuration tool.

It detects if your computer has a fingerprint reader and lets you record your fingerprints.

It then configures your system to use fingerprint authentication for:

• The login screen
• The screensaver
• sudo commands
• Admin apps (pkexec)

Under the hood, Fingwit uses fprintd but provides a smarter PAM module than pam_fprintd.so. Whereas fprintd just uses fingerprint authentication all the time, Fingwit is able to detect problematic cases and dynamically switch between fingerprint and password authentication. For instance if you’re trying to log in but your home directory is encrypted, fingerprint authentication would log you in but your session would crash since ecryptfs requires your password. Fingwit detects that kind of things so you get fingerprint authentication as much as possible, but avoid such issues.

Fingwit is an XApp so it works everywhere, in any desktop environment and on any Linux distribution.

XViewer color correction

While working on themes and colors, it came to our attention that the XViewer image viewer was applying an EDID-based color correction filter to pictures and wasn’t showing pictures exactly as they were.

This “feature” could sometimes lead to a scenario where you could take a screenshot of an app, open up the screenshot, color pick the app and the screenshot of the app and get different color codes.

Color management is already handled at hardware and desktop level, so we found this feature in Xviewer surprising and counter-intuitive. We decided to make it optional and to disable it by default.

libAdwaita apps and patches

Starting with Linux Mint 22.2, libAdwaita will be patched to work with themes. Support for libAdwaita was added to Mint-Y, Mint-X and Mint-L.

The following apps will be upgraded to their libAdwaita versions:

• gnome-calendar
• simple-scan
• baobab

libAdapta fork

In the scope of XApp and for our own projects, libAdwaita was forked into libAdapta:

https://github.com/xapp-project/libadapta

LibAdapta is libAdwaita with theme support and a few extra.

It provides the same features and the same look as libAdwaita by default.

In desktop environments which provide theme selection, libAdapta apps follow the theme and use the proper window controls.

LibAdapta also provides a compatibility header which makes it easy for developers to switch between libAdwaita and libAdapta without requiring code changes.

Framework

Last but not least, I wanted to talk about Framework a little bit.

The company sent me some of their hardware so I was able to test the Laptop 13 and the gaming Desktop already.

Their products are really nice. I hope to be able to review them soon and add them to our store section.

This isn’t just a commercial partnership. By testing this hardware we boost compatibility for the brand and significantly improve Linux Mint.

It’s thanks to Framework we implemented power profiles in Linux Mint 22.1. It’s also thanks to them that we worked on fingerprint authentication or pushed towards an HWE kernel in Linux Mint 22.2.

Their hardware challenges us to do better, because it’s packed with features in need for support.

It’s a lot of fun to play with modern tech and it’s a real treat when it contributes to making Linux Mint better!

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in April:

A total of $17,062 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 529 donors:

$531 (4th donation), Christos P.
$531 (3rd donation), Andreas B.
$531, Anonymous
$531, Rolf M.
$400, Willard K.
$318 (4th donation), Jiří B.
$212 (9th donation), Richard H.
$212, Remi C.
$200 (16th donation), Tomasz E.
$200 (2nd donation), Kirby S.
$200, charles E. M.
$159, Mr Greg V.
$120, Benny A.
$110, Anna K.
$106 (3rd donation), Klaas H.
$106, Franz H.
$106, Irene A.
$106, Marcel H.
$106, Robert D. R.
$106, Sebastian F.
$106, Thibault G.
$106, Vincent H.
$100 (20th donation), John Mc aka “Land Research Project”
$100 (17th donation), Alfred H. aka “Varmint Al”
$100 (7th donation), James F.
$100 (5th donation), Durwood A.
$100 (3rd donation), Lee J.
$100,
$100, James L. Y.
$100, James S.
$100, michael L. L.
$100, Patrick M.
$100, Richard P. B.
$100, Scott S.
$100, WebStep s.r.o.
$92, Kieran R
$75 (7th donation), Frank R.
$75 (2nd donation), Kelly E.
$74 (3rd donation), Urs K.
$70 (5th donation), Vincent F.
$63, Decorfolia
$63, Wolfgang A.
$60, Benjamin S.
$60, Ralph P.
$53 (23rd donation), Naoise G. aka “Gaff”
$53 (22nd donation), Bernard H.
$53 (14th donation), Roland H.
$53 (13th donation), Volker P.
$53 (10th donation), Jyrki A.
$53 (10th donation), Karl H.
$53 (4th donation), Christian Z.
$53 (4th donation), Peter S. aka “Pierre”
$53 (3rd donation), Pascal B.
$53 (3rd donation), Pierre V.
$53 (2nd donation), Hannu H.
$53 (2nd donation), Harry B.
$53 (2nd donation), Tero J.
$53 (2nd donation), Wilfried K.
$53, Arnest M.
$53, Bertram R.
$53, Carstzen K.
$53, Christian S.
$53, Daniel K.
$53, Denis G.
$53, Don M. H.
$53, Eugen B.
$53, Frank N.
$53, Frank P.
$53, Fritjof R.
$53, Gerd R.
$53, Hans-Joachim V.
$53, Henk S.
$53, Isolde Z.
$53, ladyred
$53, Marek Stapff aka “maff”
$53, Mathias H.
$53, Mathieu L.
$53, michael B.
$53, Peter F.
$53, Pierre-Fran%E7ois L.
$53, R. S.
$53, Richard A.
$53, S.T. L.
$53, Sebastian B.
$53, Sebastian S.
$53, TFA Sprocket
$50 (8th donation), Dean R.
$50 (7th donation), David W.
$50 (7th donation), Mothy
$50 (5th donation), Tom D.
$50 (4th donation), Anthony C. aka “Ciak”
$50 (4th donation), Michael M.
$50 (4th donation), Robert M.
$50 (3rd donation), David J.
$50 (3rd donation), David R.
$50 (3rd donation), Geoff P.
$50, Alan G.
$50, Alexander S.
$50, B%E5rd S.
$50, Christopher F.
$50, EIJI H.
$50, Jeremiah F.
$50, John S.
$50, Joseph G.
$50, Kenneth H.
$50, Kevin R.
$50, Ludovic S.
$50, Michael D.
$50, Michael J.
$50, Peter S.
$50, Richard A.
$50, Richard B.
$50, Richard G.
$50, Roger U.
$50, Scott D. T.
$50, SEAN B.
$50, Stan S.
$50, Tim M.
$50, Todd S.
$50, Zehua X.
$43, Glenn D.
$42 (2nd donation), Andreas W.
$42, Tim F.
$40 (8th donation), Kenneth R.
$40 (2nd donation), RICK C.
$40, Frank G.
$40, Michel Beaulieu aka “Bazou”
$38 (3rd donation), Martin C. C. aka “Jesus Way Truth Life”
$37, Mark J.
$35 (6th donation), P W E.
$35 (3rd donation), Mihai G.
$35, Roger M.
$33, Pablo R. D.
$31 (4th donation), Annie B.
$31, Ingo T.
$31, Jan K.
$31, Michael G.
$31, N/A
$31, Ralph S.
$30 (4th donation), Óscar R.
$30 (4th donation), Pierre S.
$30 (3rd donation), Dale K.
$30 (3rd donation), Rodney S.
$30 (2nd donation), Soner Balkir
$30, Troy W.
$27, Jessica B.
$26 (71st donation), Michael R.
$26, Andre L.
$26, David P. C. aka “AiV”
$26, Karo
$26, Ronny W.
$25 (50th donation), Linux Mint Sverige
$25 (17th donation), Vaughan Butler
$25 (9th donation), Mihnea Rădulescu
$25 (2nd donation), Thomas G.
$25, Bertram J. K.
$25, Craig S.
$25, Dave M.
$25, Rick F.
$25, Ted H.
$25, Theron K.
$24 (4th donation), Robin W.
$24 (2nd donation), Cevad O.
$23, E.G. K. aka “EGKMAN”
$22, Piotr A.
$21 (58th donation), Peter E.
$21 (30th donation), Doriano G. M.
$21 (25th donation), Stefan W.
$21 (20th donation), Benjamin W. aka “UncleBens”
$21 (17th donation), Janne S.
$21 (12th donation), Bernhard L.
$21 (12th donation), Gabriele Bandini aka “GiBi Gab”
$21 (9th donation), Kostas M. K.
$21 (8th donation), Liviu B.
$21 (7th donation), Davide P. aka “Dragone2”
$21 (7th donation), Thomas D.
$21 (6th donation), Harold H.
$21 (5th donation), Angus J. S.
$21 (5th donation), Kai D.
$21 (5th donation), Kiaran Smyth.
$21 (5th donation), Thomas M.
$21 (5th donation), William H.
$21 (4th donation), Johann K.
$21 (4th donation), Kari H.
$21 (3rd donation), Andrew G.
$21 (3rd donation), Jens R.
$21 (3rd donation), Marjan V.
$21 (3rd donation), Rainer B.
$21 (3rd donation), Sean M.
$21 (2nd donation), Andreas N.
$21 (2nd donation), Curt S.
$21 (2nd donation), Dimitris K.
$21 (2nd donation), Guenther K.
$21 (2nd donation), Heiko Z.
$21 (2nd donation), Michael T.
$21 (2nd donation), Peter B.
$21 (2nd donation), Stavros S.
$21 (2nd donation), Thomas F.
$21, albert P.
$21, Alexander T.
$21, Andrew W.
$21, Birgit B.
$21, Blaise M. B.
$21, Chris F.
$21, Christian E.
$21, Christoph E.
$21, Christophe H.
$21, Daniel A.
$21, David G.
$21, Dieter M.
$21, Dietmar J.
$21, Erika H.
$21, florent L.
$21, Gilles L.
$21, Giulio B.
$21, Jan B.
$21, Jan N.
$21, Jean-Paul W.
$21, Joaquim P.
$21, Johann F.
$21, Jonathan P.
$21, Juan D. B.
$21, Lars L.
$21, M M. K. M.
$21, Marc E. S.
$21, Marcel W.
$21, Marcelino S.
$21, marco C.
$21, mark A. B.
$21, Martin H.
$21, Martin J.
$21, MATHEO F.
$21, Matthias K.
$21, Maxim T.
$21, Michal H.
$21, Nicolas M.
$21, Peter D.
$21, Petr F.
$21, Rafael A. G.
$21, Randall S.
$21, RealizationZone
$21, Risto A.
$21, Sean D.
$21, Sebastian M.
$21, Sonia D. G.
$21, Stefan N.
$21, Theo F.
$21, Thomas M. S.
$21, Thomas W.
$21, Ulrich J. P.
$20 (67th donation), Bryan F.
$20 (46th donation), John D.
$20 (23rd donation), Nigel B.
$20 (18th donation), Dana S.
$20 (14th donation), John W.
$20 (9th donation), Anthony S.
$20 (9th donation), Leopoldo G.
$20 (9th donation), Steve T.
$20 (8th donation), Eric W.
$20 (6th donation), aka “GM46”
$20 (6th donation), Dismas S. aka “Dismas”
$20 (6th donation), Frederick S.
$20 (4th donation), Joe K.
$20 (4th donation), Yordan A.
$20 (3rd donation), Alfred A.
$20 (3rd donation), Raymond R.
$20 (2nd donation), Cosmo F.
$20 (2nd donation), J. T.
$20 (2nd donation), Joe L.
$20 (2nd donation), Rc
$20 (2nd donation), Wladyslaw T.
$20, Advisors Resource Network
$20, Albert C.
$20, Bruce H.
$20, C. C.
$20, Christian J.
$20, Duncan G.
$20, Francis B.
$20, francisco P.
$20, Hugh S.
$20, Irena K.
$20, Isaac B.
$20, Jacob R.
$20, James S.
$20, Jaroslaw R.
$20, John F.
$20, Kenneth D.
$20, Kevin S.
$20, Leoš P.
$20, Lochiel C.
$20, Logan W.
$20, marcus W.
$20, Marek M.
$20, Matthew O.
$20, Michael S.
$20, Niladri G.
$20, Patrick S.
$20, Rodrigo R.
$20, Serge D.
$20, Wesley L.
$16 (2nd donation), Gj F.
$15 (86th donation), Andreas S.
$15 (2nd donation), Thaha J.
$15, Ayush C.
$15, Florian F.
$15, Florian R.
$15, Julia B.
$15, Thorkild Z.
$14 (106th donation), Johann J.
$14 (5th donation), Laszlo F.
$11 (5th donation), Alessandro S.
$11, mohit K.
$10 (109th donation), Thomas C.
$10 (53rd donation), Philip Woodward
$10 (50th donation), Slavoljub aka “slw”
$10 (46th donation), Thomas R.
$10 (36th donation), Tugaleres.com
$10 (33rd donation), Denys G. aka “GD Next”
$10 (22nd donation), Dave S.
$10 (19th donation), Slobodan Vrkacevic
$10 (18th donation), Francois B. aka “Makoto”
$10 (18th donation), Thevirtua
$10 (16th donation), platypus products
$10 (16th donation), William M.
$10 (15th donation), Roger aka “GNU/Linux werkgroep”
$10 (13th donation), RexAlan
$10 (13th donation), TONY aka “STRUZZIN ELECTRONICS”
$10 (12th donation), Riverside Retaining Wall
$10 (10th donation), redman
$10 (8th donation), Antonio C.
$10 (7th donation), Alfons B.
$10 (7th donation), Michał K. aka “PoldekPL”
$10 (7th donation), Thomas L. aka “hensys”
$10 (6th donation), Diego A. O.
$10 (6th donation), Jan V. P. aka “putteboem”
$10 (6th donation), John G.
$10 (6th donation), Phil B.
$10 (5th donation), Aleksi L.
$10 (5th donation), Gene E.
$10 (5th donation), Guillaume M.
$10 (5th donation), Miquel S. aka “msolde”
$10 (5th donation), Nabil aka “Billy”
$10 (4th donation), Abe Z.
$10 (4th donation), Alessandro B.
$10 (4th donation), Craig D.
$10 (4th donation), Markus L.
$10 (4th donation), Peter B.
$10 (3rd donation), Alfonso M. O.
$10 (3rd donation), Darin aka “mechonster”
$10 (3rd donation), David G.
$10 (3rd donation), Gunnar A.
$10 (3rd donation), Ivan Dukov aka “illis”
$10 (3rd donation), Jay P.
$10 (3rd donation), Steven H.
$10 (3rd donation), Tobias A.
$10 (2nd donation), Andreas G.
$10 (2nd donation), Andreas L.
$10 (2nd donation), Andrew P.
$10 (2nd donation), Arsen T.
$10 (2nd donation), Carsten S.
$10 (2nd donation), Christoph G.
$10 (2nd donation), Christoph Holstein
$10 (2nd donation), Christoph S.
$10 (2nd donation), Gary B.
$10 (2nd donation), Harald F.
$10 (2nd donation), Jakub P.
$10 (2nd donation), John T.
$10 (2nd donation), Jón Ragnarsson
$10 (2nd donation), Joshua G.
$10 (2nd donation), Juan Z.
$10 (2nd donation), Lars D.
$10 (2nd donation), Ricardo J.
$10 (2nd donation), Robert A.
$10 (2nd donation), Thomas R.
$10, ABDULLA ALJEHANI
$10, ABELARDO L. C.
$10, Albert G.
$10, Aldo G.
$10, Alessandro G.
$10, Aliaksei K.
$10, alsh
$10, Antonius B.
$10, Avraam B. B.
$10, Bernd %.
$10, boris K.
$10, Christoph D
$10, Colin S.
$10, Dainius B.
$10, Daniel B.
$10, Daniel R.
$10, Diego Z.
$10, E N.
$10, Elpidio F.
$10, Eva T.
$10, Fabian S.
$10, Fabien O.
$10, FABRIZIO C.
$10, Florian R.
$10, Fr%E9d%E9ric Pepin
$10, Franco M.
$10, Frank R. B.
$10, Gabriele M.
$10, Gerald T.
$10, Gerold H.
$10, Gianluca A.
$10, Gilles T.
$10, Greger T.
$10, Hans V. T.
$10, Hartmut H.
$10, Hiten K.
$10, Howard W.
$10, Iancu C.
$10, Ivar S.
$10, Jaime E. Paillier G aka “Paillier999”
$10, jaime G. L.
$10, James B.
$10, JAMES F.
$10, Jin Xi
$10, Johan W.
$10, Johann L.
$10, Julio B.
$10, Kacper Ch.
$10, Kai D. S.
$10, Kenneth O.
$10, Kenton B.
$10, Kevin W.
$10, Lars K.
$10, Manuel S.
$10, Marco M.
$10, marco P.
$10, mark C.
$10, Markus S.
$10, Martin A.
$10, Martin R.
$10, Matthias H.
$10, MAURO F.
$10, Mauro F.
$10, Mitu M.
$10, Mohamed T.
$10, MR C. C.
$10, NORI I. aka “NORI”
$10, NovaDorium
$10, Octavian I.
$10, Pablo M.
$10, Pedica E.
$10, Petri M.
$10, Philippe D.
$10, Pierpaolo G.
$10, Piotr R. aka “papcio”
$10, Rainer M.
$10, Richard M.
$10, RICHARD W.
$10, Robert C.
$10, Roberto M.
$10, Roy D.
$10, Sasha E.
$10, Sebastian M.
$10, Simone D.
$10, Stefan F.
$10, Stephen R.
$10, SunBaked272
$10, Sven F.
$10, Tamas W.
$10, Tihomir S.
$10, Tim B.
$10, Tim S.
$10, TONY M.
$10, V%E1clav B.
$10, William P.
$10, Yann V.
$7, Alfonso Z.
$7, Walter Z.
$185 from 53 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Patrons:

Linux Mint is proudly supported by 1,590 patrons, for a sum of $4,190 per month.

To become a Linux Mint patron, please visit https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint

🚀 Features

• Removed Nostr support (#784) by @spacecowboy in #784
• Removed Conscrypt library (#789) by @spacecowboy in #789
• Android 10 (sdk29) is now the oldest supported version (#796) by @spacecowboy in #796

🐛 Bug Fixes & Minor Changes

• Ensured app is compatible with 16KB page sizes on modern Android devices (#781) by @spacecowboy in #781
• Update feed URLs based on reported URL in feed (#785) by @spacecowboy in #785

🌐 Translations

• Updated Japanese translation using Weblate by @larouxn in #765
• Updated Turkish translation (#783) by @mikropsoft in #783
• Updated Catalan translation using Weblate by @sf0nt in commit
• Updated Latvian translation using Weblate by @Coool in #782
• Changed “API Key” to “API key” (#802) by @GerbillLife in #802

❤️ New Contributors

• @GerbillLife made their first contribution in #802

With LibreOffice 24.8 close to end of life, all users are invited to update their free office suite to the latest release

Berlin, 6 June 2025 – The Document Foundation is pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 25.2.4, the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.2 family for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux, available for download at https://www.libreoffice.org/download [1].

With LibreOffice 24.8 approaching the end of life, this release – which includes dozens of fixes and enhancements that further improve the suite’s performance, reliability and interoperability – is ready for production environments. We invite all users to update their installation as soon as possible.

LibreOffice 25.2.4 is based on the LibreOffice Technology, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – either from TDF or from the ecosystem – that fully support the two ISO standards for document formats: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the closed and proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

Products based on the LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF recommends a LibreOffice Enterprise optimized version from one of the ecosystem companies, with dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years.

English manuals for LibreOffice 25.2 Write, Impress, Draw and Math are available for download at https://books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.

Downloading LibreOffice

All available versions of LibreOffice for the desktop can be downloaded from the same website: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project by making a donation: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

[1] Fixes in RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.4/RC1. Fixes in RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.4/RC2. Fixes in RC3: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.4/RC3.

At the beginning of May, we began a new Month of LibreOffice campaign, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out…

This is a huge increase over the last campaign, in November, which had 301 winners. So that’s fantastic work, everyone! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped out in our projects and communities. And those are just community contributions, not including the hundreds more from our ecosystem and certified developers!

We’re hugely thankful for the work – and, of course, everyone who’s listed on the wiki page can get a sticker pack, with the stickers shown above.

How to claim

If you see your name (or username) on this page, get in touch! Email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with:

• your name (or username) from the wiki page
• and your postal address

…and we’ll send you a bunch of stickers for your PC, laptop and other kit. (Note: your address will only be used to post the stickers, and will be deleted immediately afterwards.) If you contributed to the project in May but you’re not on the wiki page, please let us know what you did, so that we can add you!

There is one more thing…

And we have an extra bonus: ten contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a LibreOffice hoodie, T-shirt, rucksack or snazzy glass mug. Here are the winners (names or usernames) – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:

• Takenori Yasuda
• koyotak
• Andrew Kopf
• HiTom
• bantoniof
• Dominick
• Jeremy Norvell
• skyandrews
• Johan van der Knijff
• Yashodhan Sawardekar

Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thanks once again to everyone who took part – your contributions keep the LibreOffice project strong. We plan to have another Month of LibreOffice in November, but everyone is welcome to see what they can do for LibreOffice at any time!

Xisco Fauli, Ilmari Lauhakangas and Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice, discuss Quality Assurance (QA) in free and open source software . (This video is also available on PeerTube.)

• Milestone

This is a bug-fix release for FreshRSS 1.26.x

A few highlights ✨:

• Keep sort and order criteria during navigation
• Implement loading spinner for marking as favourite/read
• Many bug fixes

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @Inverle and newcomers @CarelessCaution, @the7thNightmare

Full changelog:

• Features
  • Keep sort and order criteria during navigation #7585
  • Add info about PDO::ATTR_CLIENT_VERSION (relevant for MySQL / MariaDB with obsolete driver) #7591
• Bug fixing
  • Fix SQL request for user labels with custom sort (affecting PostgreSQL) #7588
  • Fix regression for favicon in GReader and Fever APIs #7573
  • Fix newest articles (within last second) not shown #7577
  • Fix duplicate HTTP header for POST #7556
  • Fix important articles on reader view #7602
  • Fix remove last share method #7613
  • Fix API handling of default category #7610
  • Fix user self-deletion #7626
  • Move PHP minimum version check #7560
• Security
  • Fix encoding of themes #7565
  • Fix .htaccess.dist for access to /scripts/vendor/ #7598
• SimplePie
  • Strip more HTML deprecated styles attributes: bgcolor, text, background, link, alink, vlink #7606
• UI
  • Implement loading spinner for marking as favourite/read #7564
  • Provide theme class for CSS #7559
• Deployment
  • Use HTTP Cache-Control: immutable for some files #7552
  • Drop Apache 2.2 (only support Apache 2.4+) #7561
• I18n
  • Improve Indonesian #7622
  • Improve Polish #7587
• Misc.
  • Update to PHPMailer 6.10.0 #7542
  • Update dev dependencies #7630, #7631, #7632
    #7633, #7634, #7635

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

• We started May with a new Month of LibreOffice campaign! This is something we do every six months, to say thank you to contributors and encourage more people to join our project. We’ll post the final results here very soon…

• Throughout the month, we posted many sections from the 2024 Annual Report of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, including documentation, quality assurance, native language projects, marketing activities and websites, blogs and social media.

• Next, we reported back from the LibreOffice Community at FLISOL Brasilia 2025.

• This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place in Budapest from 4 – 6 September, and the call for papers is now open. Submit a talk, and we hope to seeing you there!

• On May 8, we announced LibreOffice 24.8.7, the seventh and last minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family. After this, all users are strongly recommended to upgrade to the LibreOffice 25.2 branch.

• On Fridays during May, we posted about ODF – the Open Document Format, as used by LibreOffice and many other apps. We started with an ODF 20th anniversary video, followed by a detailed look at what exactly ODF is, why it’s important and how it compares to proprietary formats.

• Half-way through May, we announced the projects selected for LibreOffice in the Google Summer of Code 2025. We’re looking forward to seeing the results!

Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better!

From May 24-28, 2025, we hosted an Inkscape Summit in Nuremberg, Germany, just before this year's Libre Graphics Meeting. With 14 on-site participants, 2 remote participants and 3 external guests (Cedric, Elisa and Tiar), this was Inkscape's largest physical event yet, and a good sign the project is healthy and growing. 

While we also got a fair amount of code done - 33 merge requests were opened over the course of the summit by its participants - the focus of this summit was on strategic planning and team discussions. 

On Sunday, the team visited the ZAM Erlangen makerspace to observe and try out what Inkscape is used for in the wild. We had fun stitching logos, lasercutting coasters, or drawing on eggs with an EggBot. 

Inkscape team members observe an egg being decorated by an Inkscape-operated EggBot at ZAM Erlangen

This event was made possible with community funds, i.e. your donations. Thanks for your generous support! 

Below is an account of the meetings we had during the summit. Many of those pointed to strategic improvements in the project's direction. Help with these is greatly appreciated - if you want to contribute towards any of them, do get in touch!

Future of Live Path Effects

Marc proposed a redesign of the Live Path Effect system. In short, the proposal aims to enable procedural, non-destructive effects in Inkscape, with inspiration drawn from Blender's geometry nodes and Graphite. This would enable many workflows which now need either scripting (extensions) or are impossible to achieve, and make the entire path effect system much more robust. 

The custom additions to the SVG file format would be designed and specified, code sprawl of LPE-related code reduced and test coverage increased. 

We agreed on a set of changes for a prototype of this system.

UX Quality Initiative

Henrique presented his UX research; in dozens of hours of work, he had categorized all UX / UI related issues in our bugtrackers and localized areas most in need of attention. 

During the summit, a team consisting of ltlnx, Yoti, Adam and Henrique condensed it into a proposal to hire a UX designer and a developer as contractors; after a period of UX studies, the designer would come up with actionable changes and the developer would implement them. This proposal will be iterated upon and then be submitted for a vote to the Project Leadership Committee (PLC).

Roadmap / Project Priorities Working Group

Martin presented a proposal to form a Roadmap Working Group. This group would comprise of representatives from all of the project's subgroup, and its task would be to maintain a list of priority areas in the project (without explicitly promising them to users). 

This list would then inform decisions such as hiring and project selection for Google Summer of Code or Outreachy; it could also serve as guidance for contributors looking for inspiration. 

While the team maintained that we are in no position to attach dates to the roadmap, such a working group would be useful as a forum, and would tie in well with other initiatives, such as the Grants program. 

Martin plans to finish up the proposal and submit it for a vote soon.

Quality assurance

Despite a small number of automated tests that check against regressions in the Inkscape code, most of our test coverage is proved by manual user testing. 

Rafał presented his recent work towards improving the quality and stability of Inkscape by providing a good infrastructure for unit testing, in particular by providing a solid CMake infrastructure, mock objects and example unit tests. 

Good unit testing will become a focus in our code review process.

Steam Release

Our guest Tiar from the Krita team presented to us how Krita successfully released on Steam, and how they generate a significant amount of revenue from this channel. She showed us the most important rules for a successful Steam launch: from number of Wishlist items to Daily Deal, from discounts to the importance of good screenshots. 

The Inkscape PLC had recently decided to enable a Steam release; the necessary paperwork is currently under review by the SFC, our fiscal host. Vaibhav will coordinate the process of releasing on Steam.

Developer Documentation

Our developer documentation is currently spread around in many places: some is on the main website (with outdated translations), some is in the Wiki, some in the git repository. 

We formulated our requirements for the documentation and decided to migrate it in the main repository (except for short-lived or work-in-progress). Outdated Wiki information will be removed. Max already made progress towards this by moving our build instructions to git. 

Selected parts of the documentation may be auto-deployed to inkscape.org. Unfortunately we had to disable indexing of most of our website because AI crawlers quickly overwhelm it otherwise, so the last word on documentation remains to be spoken.

Node tool improvements

Rafał presented his plans to refactor the node tool with a number of architectural changes of the backend. These changes will not be visible to uses at first except for some outstanding bugfixes, but will enable better control of path-like objects in the long run - from his work on manipulating arc segments to control points for B-Splines, Spiro curves or κ-curves.

Extension packaging

Triggered by Mario's experience of maintaining a large set of extensions (MightyScape), we discussed how to make the process of packaging, submitting, reviewing and presenting an extension more efficient and transparent. Drawing inspirations from projects like OctoPrint and Typst, which have a healthy extension ecosystem around them, we came up with a process that now needs to be discussed with other extension stakeholders and finally implemented.

Finishing up the GTK4 migration & releasing Inkscape 1.5

In the last year, Inkscape has successfully migrated to GTK4, and the GTK4 version (master) has become the basis for all other development work. 

Nevertheless, there is a number of outstanding problems, especially on Windows and macOS. Many of those issues require fixes in the upstream GTK framework. 

During the summit, Jonathan, PBS and ltlnx came up with a proposal to hire contractors - both from within the Inkscape project and outside GTK experts - to finish up the work, targeting a 1.5 release early next year. 

The 2025 Inkscape Summit Nuremberg particpants in front of the venue (Youth Hostel Nuremberg, Germany).

After the summit

Most of the team will stay for the Libre Graphics Meeting, held directly afterwards in Nuremberg, which even features two Inkscape-related presentations: Henrique will again present his UX initiative, and Daniel Schneider will give a talk about InkStitch. Looking forward to the next Inkscape meeting! 

Adam, Henrique, Ishaan, Jonathan, KrIr17, ltlnx, Marc, Mario, Martin, Max, Mike, PBS, Rafał, Tavmjong, Vaibhav and Yoti

 

Design has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in recent years. The design/UX community has continued to support QA by evaluating user reports on Bugzilla, helping development with mockups, and mentoring volunteers and students in different projects.

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Besides a large number of fixed issues on macOS thanks to Patrick Luby, and continuous work on the Navigator by Jim Raykowski, we had many more improvements – here is just a small selection:

Improvements in LibreOffice 24.2

The column/row for active cells can be highlighted in Calc (implemented by Sahil Gautam)

Tools ▸ Options was complemented by a search feature (Bayram Çiçek)

Comment styles were introduced for quick and consistent formatting of all comments (Maxim Monastirsky) (depicted in the screenshot at the top of this post)

Improvements in LibreOffice 24.8

Bundled templates were refactored with localized placeholders (Laurent Balland)

New “Quick Find” deck in the Sidebar, which lists the search results along with their context (Khushi Gautam)

Formatting characters are now treated independently from fields and do not toggle with non-printable characters (Heiko Tietze)

“Keep Ratio” settings in the Position and Size dialogs are more intuitive now with a lock symbol and reference lines (Heiko Tietze)

Hovering over a layer’s tab in Draw highlights the objects it contains (Jim Raykowski)

Among many other improvements to the Basic IDE, a dialog was added that allows users to pick one of six syntax highlighting colour schemes (Rafael Lima)

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

When we create or share a document – whether a simple text, complex spreadsheet or professional presentation – we make a choice that goes far beyond the file extension. This is because the format gives us, or takes away, control over the content.

This post compares the Open Document Format (ODF) with proprietary formats such as DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. The comparison is not just about compatibility, but also about freedom, security, costs, transparency, and our long-term digital future.

We have already discussed ODF, and we will continue to do so until its 10th anniversary as an ISO/IEC standard in May 2026, because it is the only open standard available to users. We hope that an increasing number of users will understand how important it is for them to use it to have complete and lasting control over the content they have created, i.e. for their digital freedom, rather than for those of us who support it.
ODF is the native format of LibreOffice and other programmes that use the LibreOffice Technology platform. These programmes offer the same functionality, flexibility, security, robustness and interoperability as applications that promote proprietary formats, but without the lock-in strategy.

Incidentally, even so-called open-source applications (read their AGPL licence to understand why we say “so-called”) handle documents in ODF format, yet continue to promote their own formats, preventing users from having full control over their content – because this would jeopardise their business strategy.

So, what are proprietary formats?

They are developed and controlled by a single company and are typically only fully supported within that company’s ecosystem. Common examples include .docx, .xlsx and .pptx (Microsoft), as well as .pages, .numbers and .key (Apple) and .gdoc, .gsheet and .gslides (Google). While the specifications for these formats may be public, this does not mean they are completely open, as support is always limited by what the provider allows or documents, and is dictated by their commercial strategies.

Comparison between ODF and proprietary formats

1. Control and vendor lock-in

ODF

• Completely open and standardised
• Anyone can implement or use it without legal restrictions
• The user, not the software provider, controls the documents

Proprietary formats

• Designed and controlled by a single provider
• File characteristics and behaviour may change without notice
• Users are often forced to update their software in order to access their documents

Example: If Microsoft changes how DOCX handles embedded fonts or custom styles, users of older versions of Microsoft software or compatible applications may have difficulty viewing or reading files.

2. Interoperability and compatibility

ODF

• Designed with interoperability in mind
• Promotes consistency in formatting and behaviour across different platforms and software
• Facilitates the development of a multi-vendor ecosystem

Proprietary formats

• Optimised for performance within the vendor’s software
• Third-party implementations often encounter compatibility issues
• File rendering may vary depending on the platform, particularly for advanced formatting

Example: A spreadsheet with complex macros in .xlsx format that works correctly with Excel may not work, or may lose functionality, when used with LibreOffice Calc or Google Sheets.

3. Transparency and trust

ODF

• The format is documented, and matches the documentation
• Data storage is also documented, and users control their files’ location
• There are no secrets or hidden metadata, and the XML file is user readable

Proprietary formats

• They may contain undocumented metadata or behaviour, and the XML file is not user readable
• The complex and opaque structure of the files can create security issues, and files’ location is not controlled by the user
• It is not always clear what information is embedded (e.g. edit history and comments)

Example: a DOCX file may contain residual metadata, such as the names of authors, the date and time of changes, and comments, even after they have been removed.

4. Digital preservation and long-term access

ODF

• Designed for compatibility, interoperability, and long-term archiving
• Recommended by governments (UK, Taiwan, the Netherlands and France) and supranational organisations (EU, NATO)
• Open and future-proof, with regular updates from a known Technical Committee overseen by OASIS

Proprietary formats

• Risk of format obsolescence (remember .doc, .wps and .wpd?)
• Require specific software versions to access older files

Example: a government archive using ODF can be confident that it will still be able to access documents in 20 years’ time, while this is not guaranteed by proprietary formats, which are closely linked to the lifecycles of corporate products.

5. Public sector and legal obligations

Governments and institutions around the world should switch to open standards to ensure data sovereignty and reduce dependence on specific suppliers.

• The UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Taiwan have all launched initiatives to promote ODF
• The European Union’s open-source strategy recommends using ODF in all public administrations
• Italy’s Digital Administration Code supports open formats for public documents to ensure long-term accessibility

Why? Because public data should be open and accessible, not locked behind corporate paywalls or licence terms.

6. Costs and licences

ODF

• Free to use and implement
• No licence fees, subscription costs or vendor lock-in

Proprietary formats

• Almost always tied to paid software (e.g. Microsoft 365)
• In some cases, access requires a cloud account and/or an active subscription
• There are often restrictions on redistribution and format conversion

Example: If a school switches from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and adopts the OpenDocument Format (ODF), it can save thousands of euros in licence costs without sacrificing functionality for students.

7. Innovation and community support

ODF

• Developed transparently by a global community
• Supported by several applications, both open source and proprietary
• Open to improvements by anyone, under the Technical Committee overview

Proprietary formats

• Innovation is centralised and constrained by the company roadmap, and development is closed and not transparent
• Feature priorities are determined by revenue, and not by user needs

Example: Users can propose new features for ODF, contribute code, and fund development, all without having to wait for the company’s priorities to align with their own.

Conclusion: Why ODF matters

The choice of ODF is not linked to ideology or politics. It is a choice that offers users significant practical benefits: complete control over their data; independence from a single company’s tools, strategies and business model; the ability to access and share documents more reliably on any hardware platform or operating system; and support for an ecosystem where open standards drive progress rather than profit margins. ODF stands for transparency, freedom, and openness to the future. Try it, it’s easy and doesn’t cost anything. Download LibreOffice and you’re done.

By helping to translate and market LibreOffice around the world, native language projects bring enthusiasm and passion to the global community. Here’s what they did in 2024…

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Armenian

In 2024, the Armenian translation of LibreOffice reached 100% thanks to the efforts of Tigran Zargaryan. The suite was offered in Armenian for the first time. In addition, he ensured that the strings in the LibreOffice UI-master, website, Android Viewer and Help also reached 100% translated.

In appreciation for Tigran’s work, TDF invited him to join the LibreOffice Conference 2024 in Luxembourg using the foundation’s travel support programme.

Czech

Throughout the year, Czech speakers worked on keeping the translation of LibreOffice’s UI complete, and the Help content around 95%. They presented the software at booths at two events: InstallFest in Prague in April, and LinuxDays in Prague in October.

They supported LibreOffice users on the Czech Ask site, and maintained social media accounts including X (Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. They also introduced a new Mastodon account.

Czech speakers produced many translated user guides in 2024, including the Getting Started Guide 24.8, Writer Guide 24.2 and Impress guide 7.5. And throughout the year they maintained the Czech LibreOffice website.

Danish

Speakers of Danish brought the user interface translation of LibreOffice up to 100%, while the Help content approached 100% (that goal was finally reached two months into 2025). They also translated the subtitles for LibreOffice videos covering features in new major releases.

Dutch

Dutch-speaking community members supported users by answering questions on the Ask LibreOffice website and mailing lists. They also translated the following guidebooks: the Calc Guide for LibreOffice 7.6 (translated and published in January); the Writer Guide for LibreOffice 24.2 (March); the Calc Guide for LibreOffice 24.2 (June); the Draw guide for LibreOffice 24.2 (July); the Impress Guide for LibreOffice 24.2 (July); the Getting Started Guide for LibreOffice 24.2 (August); the Impress Guide for LibreOffice 24.8 (October); the Draw Guide for LibreOffice 24.8 (December); the Writer Guide for LibreOffice 24.8 (December); and the Math Guide for LibreOffice 24.8 (December).

On Weblate, the community managed to keep up with the changes of the UI, maintaining it at 100% translated. Although the Help content kept growing they were able to maintain it at 100% translated.

Community members also set up a stand at the NLLGG in May 2024 – a conference of the Dutch Linux community. There, LibreOffice users could obtain information and ask questions about LibreOffice, whether or not in conjunction with a Linux operating system.

They also had a stand at the LocHal open source event in November 202 – another conference of the Dutch Linux community.

Finnish

There was ongoing translation of the LibreOffice user interface and (to a lesser extent) Help, along with ongoing recruitment of volunteers on the vapaaehtoistyo.fi online platform. In addition, there was translation of the upcoming LibreOffice website redesign.

French

Thanks to the French-speaking community, translations on Weblate were maintained at 100% for all versions of LibreOffice. There were also other translations: the new website (based on Hugo); Calc functions on the wiki; press releases and video subtitles for LibreOffice “New Features” videos; and release notes for all versions.

In terms of events, community members were present at Capitole du Libre (Toulouse) and Open Source Experience (Paris). There was also coordination with UBO University for LibreOffice guidebook translations by translator students.

German

In terms of translations and documentation, the German-speaking community continued their work on Weblate by translating LibreOffice’s user interface and Help content. They also translated the release notes for major updates of the software, blog posts from TDF’s English blog, and published videos in German showing and explaining various features in LibreOffice. In addition the German community updated the Base Guide for versions 24.2 and 24.8.

Development continued on the XRechnungs-Extension for the new German legal requirements (which became effective in January 2025).

Members of the German-speaking community attended various events throughout the year to promote LibreOffice and encourage more people to join the project, such as the Univention Summit 2024 in January, Chemnitz Linux Days 2024 in March, FrOSCon in August and 38c3 in December.

Finally, the community helped to raise awareness of the ongoing migration of 30,000 PCs to LibreOffice in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Japanese

The Japanese community had its local annual conference, LibreOffice Kaigi 2024 Online – which they reported about on their blog.

There were also Online Study Parties, held twice, where users shared knowledge and interacted with each other. And then there were 44 online hackfests throughout the year, where participants worked together in the community to make progress on tasks and transfer skills. They mainly checked the Japanese Ask LibreOffice website and tried to answer questions, but also did some UI translation, and occasionally bug triaging and bug reporting. All online events were held on Jitsi and streamed live on YouTube.

Meanwhile, there were in-person events every month in Awaji, Osaka City. They were held jointly with Open Awaji, an event themed around open data and the movement to open cities. Other activities at events included having booths and open source conferences (Osaka, Tokyo, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Tokyo, and Fukuoka). There was also the Kansai Open Forum 2024, an event for open source and IT communities in the Kansai region that has been held annually since 2002. Attendees talked about LibreOffice.

Japanese community members participated in the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 and COSCUP (Taiwan), along with the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2024 (Tokyo).

Six people from Japan participated in the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 in Taipei, two of whom gave joint presentations. Many members of the FLOSS community outside of the LibreOffice project who participated in COSCUP also attended the LibreOffice Community Party.

In terms of translations into Japanese, the user interface was 93% complete, and Help content 48% complete. There were also guidebook translations (Writer, Calc etc.) – Meguro-san translated using TexTra, a machine translation service provided by NICT, a Japanese government research institute.

On Japanese Ask LibreOffice, 101 questions or comments were added in 2024, while on the blog, community members posted 19 articles; these mainly consisted of translating the English TDF blog, especially the release announcements. And finally, on social media, the Japanese LibreOffice X (Twitter) account had: 2936 followers and 65 posts, while on Facebook there were: 624 followers and 23 posts. The Japanese community has created a Bluesky account but has not yet started using it fully.

Norwegian – Nynorsk

The Nyorsk project is led by one translator (Kolbjørn Stuestøl) who has maintained the user interface and Help content translations for LibreOffice at 100%.

Portuguese (Brazil)

One of the community’s key achievements was the publication of the Guia do Writer 7.6, a fully revised Portuguese translation of the Writer Guide 7.6, initially generated through machine translation and then carefully edited for linguistic accuracy and style. To streamline future translation efforts, the community launched a GitHub project utilizing the OmegaT computer-assisted translation tool, which integrates machine translation to reduce rework and improve quality control.

The local team — Tim Brennan, Tulio Macedo, and Olivier Hallot — successfully completed the full translation of both the user interface and Help content into Brazilian Portuguese. Rafael Lima contributed significantly by enhancing the Operations Research tools, commonly known as “Solver,” making them fully functional.

Weekly community meetings were held every Wednesday at 21:00 local time, providing a space to discuss all aspects of the LibreOffice environment and stay updated on developments from TDF.

The community also revamped the announcements for LibreOffice versions 24.2 and 24.8 with multimedia content tailored for Brazilian social media platforms, greatly expanding their reach — an effort led by Eliane Domingos.

Support and engagement remained strong across multiple channels, including active participation in the Brazilian Portuguese section of the Ask LibreOffice forum, two dedicated Telegram groups, Facebook and Instagram communities, and the ongoing translation of wiki pages, with notable contributions from Diego.

Spanish

Spanish speakers worked on updating their translation of the LibreOffice Base tutorial book (by Mariano Casanova), reaching 80% translation status. 31 articles were published on the Spanish blog, and community members worked on updating the LibreOffice UI translation (99%) and Help content (around 80%). They also published various guidebooks: Draw Guide 7.6 (in ODT, PDF and HTML formats); Calc Guide 7.5 (in ODT, PDF and HTML formats); and the Math Guide 7.3 (in HTML format).

Tagalog

The LibreOffice Tagalog localization project was relaunched in April 2024 after it was discovered that a previous effort had been abandoned years earlier. Motivated by the opportunity to complete the project for the benefit of both the global and local community, a new initiative was launched with the goal of finishing the translation within a year.

Working closely with the LibreOffice localisation support community, the project followed a consistent schedule of weekly and monthly progress updates. A key focus was integrating and automating translations using three different AI language tools, which included implementing verification processes, suggestions, and comments to ensure quality.

Technical workflows were developed to compile developer edition translations on a bi-weekly basis using Linux Mint, with results verified and shared through best practices posts on a US-based technology blog. The project also drew on the support of Filipino relatives to better understand and incorporate the nuances of various Filipino dialects, enhancing translation accuracy and cultural relevance.

The translation work was completed ahead of schedule in January 2025 – four months earlier than planned. Fine-tuning continued with the help of the l10n support team to correct inaccuracies, particularly in the LibreOffice menus. (The screenshot below shows TDF’s Weblate instance being used to translate LibreOffice into Tagalog.)

In a further step toward community impact, the project began outreach to local contacts in Manila to share tools and methods used in the localization process, aiming to support similar efforts in K–12 education and non-profit business software across the Philippines.

Thank you to everyone

These are just some of the native language projects in the LibreOffice community, who provided summaries for the Annual Report. But there are many more – so we at The Document Foundation would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who in the native language communities. Your work makes LibreOffice accessible to hundreds of millions of people around the world, and your passion is wonderful. Thank you so much!

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

The first minor release since Inkscape 1.4 is here!

No worries, you didn't miss 1.4.1! Due to a signficant bug that was only discovered shortly before its planned release, 1.4.1 has been merged with 1.4.2. 

With lots of fixes, some smaller improvements and even a few new features around file format support, we believe it was well worth the wait.

Here's a summary of what to expect from the new release:

• A new splash screen, providing a visual cue while Inkscape loads in the background
• Initial support for importing Vectornator / Linearity Curve files
• A new extension to Clean up Paths
• Substantially improved Affinity Designer files (.afdesign) import
• 20 crash/freeze fixes, many of which affected PDF import
• more than 50 other bug fixes and small improvements, including improvements to Boolean operations, layer selection, minimal window width and restoration of Spray tool buttons' functionality
• and 15 updated translations!

For more detailed information on the changes in version 1.4.2 available in the release notes.

Again, thanks to all Inkscape users and contributors for their support in identifying and flagging these critical issues for us through sending bug reports for our volunteer developers to examine and solve.

Should you experience an issue while using Inkscape, please let us know! We've put together a step-by-step video to help you post your first bug reports on Gitlab.

Built with the power of a team of mostly volunteers, this open source vector graphics editor represents the combined efforts, passion and work of many hearts and hands from around the world, ensuring that Inkscape remains available free for everyone to download and enjoy.

If you'd like to contribute to the project, you are more than welcome in our project's global community! You'll find the list of ways to connect with us here.

You can also help Inkscape to stay alive and evolve by making a donation.

Get Inkscape 1.4.2 for Linux, Windows or macOS!

Draw Freely.

For the past few days, 7 Inkscape Members met up in Frankfurt, Germany to collaborate on various projects and get to know each other.

We were especially delighted to have two InkStitch maintainers, a major downstream project of Inkscape, join us. This way, we got to learn about the struggles and worries of projects using Inkscape better, and even built a new capability for extensions to interact with Inkscape during the event.

Marc, our release manager, cleared out our merge request backlog, reviewing and merging various contributions. He also set up a new web-based translation service, so that translators don't have to learn how to use git, and we hopefully see better Inkscape translations in many languages. He also collaborated with Vaibhav on getting the handles behave well when editing Text to Path.

Jonathan, extensions maintainer, enabled Inkscape to tell extensions in real-time about changes in the document (merge request), and even update the document in return. The new system works on all major platforms. This feature was requested by our InkStitch friends, who will use it to build a preview of the stitch pattern while the user is working on the document. Variations of this feature were often requested by extension authors, so we're excited what the community will use it for!

Tav was working on delivering color font support, and helped Martin and Vaibhav with a wide variety of text-related problems.

Martin wasn't able to attend in-person, but did join via Video Chat to work on PDF support and help answering questions with other people in Frankfurt. He got up at 3am his time to attend!

Ravi is one of our GSoC students from 2024, and we're happy that we got to know him better & to integrate him into our team! He is still working on the node-based filter editor, his GSoC project (merge request), and is hopefully finished soon.

Vaibhav also is a former GSoC student, but is contributing regularly since. He is currently working on improving Text on Path (merge request). Thanks to his work during the Summit, Text on Path now loops around on closed paths (an SVG2 feature)  and has correct and intuitive handle movement.

Kaalleen, InkStitch maintainer, helped us understand their packaging process and helped shape the direction of development on the extensions environment. Apart from that, she worked on various InkStitch issues, including support for long-arm quilting machines. Also, she gifted all of us beautiful bags with the 1.4 About screen stitched on (she also has a tutorial for this on the InkStitch website).

 

The beautiful embroidery Kaalleen gifted to the other participants (from the InkStitch Website).

After 3 days full of coding and enlightening conversations, we now take home with new ideas in our luggage, and look forward to the next meeting - May 2025 in Nuremberg, just before LGM.

The 7 participants of the Frankfurt Summit.

 

November 6, 2024, marks the end of the 20th anniversary year for the Inkscape project, and the beginning of a new decade of adventure. There were a few milestones this past year, among them an informal global celebration, a bug-fix program, an About Screen Contest, an Inkscape Summit, a summer of code, and the launch of version 1.4.

Here’s a brief look at some of those milestones:

Bringing contributors from around the world together in real time online

Looking back over the past year, our 20th anniversary got off to an active start with an online anniversary party in November 2023, where users and contributors gathered over the span of several time zones to welcome guests who shared their passion for Inkscape, their art, and discussed how and why they contribute to the project. The world showed up to hang out and filled us all with pride to be part of this open source community.

From there, things moved quickly with preparations for version 1.4 and all the elements that come together before the annual version release.

Inkscape’s 1.4 About Screen Contest

Preparations for the popular About Screen Contest began early in the year, setting up the voting space and rallying contributors to organize the promotion and review of contest entries. The winning entry was featured in the 1.4 release that launched in the Fall of 2024. If you’re curious about the contest, feel free to check out the rules and history of this tradition.

Inkscape’s Contributor Blog

Some of our developers, especially those who are paid by the project (i.e. from your donations), publish articles about their work in our Contributor Blog, which can be found on the web site under the News tab. Among the blog posts include ones the progress made on our Bug Accelerator program, the Adobe Illustrator File import project, and the GTK4 migration work. You can find the posts through to Spring 2024 online.

Inkscape Summit 2024 in Rennes, France!

We had a great Inkscape Summit in Rennes, France, in May 2024. Our three-day meeting was well attended and offered an opportunity for developers and a couple of other contributors to meet, work, and discuss the future of the project. A member of the SFC was in attendance and participants had a chance to exchange with a representative from the Open Document Project, too, on open source projects.

Learning to Code through Contributing to Inkscape

Inkscape developers continued the longstanding tradition of participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) program, which enables people new to open source projects and students to learn about software development and gain experience within a project environment. Several Inkscape developers mentored three students in 2024, one of whom is still working hard. If you’re curious to know what these students accomplished, their code journeys can be found on the GSOC site.

When it comes to the software itself, Inkscape has been embarking on big changes that will span a couple of future versions, specifically the transition to GTK4. This year marked a big milestone as the master branch was successfully migrated to the new code base. Also in the works is the future of CMYK color inside of Inkscape, though there is no final date set yet for integrating a system.

Inkscape Monthly Art Challenges

This past year has seen regular monthly Inkscape Challenges in the forum, posted on social media channels, to encourage Inkscape artists to share their work and learn new skills. From easy to intermediate projects to challenge your Inkscape skills, there’s something for everyone who is curious to learn. These challenges, along with the many opportunities to learn and collaborate within the project, have helped to bring new contributors to the table, too. You’ll find plenty of art to enjoy in the project’s forums!

Looking at Possible Futures for the Project

In October, an informal discussion was held among contributors to look at the possibilities of taking the  project in a new direction in the future. As with some other open source projects in the past, Inkscape is seeking to grow and explore possible futures, including being an independent organization. While there are no immediate plans to move from SFC, the discussion led to contributors beginning to imagine what Inkscape might look like three years down the road. At 21, it’s time to consider the possible bright futures ahead.

For now, we would like to say a big thank you to all of you, Inkscape users, contributors, and supporters. It’s in working together that this software program continues to develop and grow.

Curious to know what contributing to Inkscape might bring to your world? Get in touch!

In the meantime, enjoy using Inkscape, a professional quality vector graphics software on your Linux, Mac OS X and / or Windows desktop computers.

Draw Freely.

On November 18, 2023, the Inkscape project celebrated its 20th anniversary.

The anniversary celebration was an online get-together of Inkscape users and contributors.

This was an initiative by the Vectors team and the intention was to bring Inkscape users and contributors together to celebrate 20 years of Inkscape.

Inkscape is used by people around the world. To accommodate that, two sessions were organized in different time zones. The first session was scheduled at 12:00 UTC for folks from regions like Eastern North America, Europe, India, & Indonesia. The second session started at 18:00 UTC for other regions, including Oceania.

The attendees were invited to share their approximate location in the world so that we could “map” the Inkscape community that came together to celebrate the anniversary. The interactive map can be viewed online. It is a beautiful souvenir of Inkscape’s global reach.

 

The larger Inkscape community also sent birthday wishes which were read during the sessions. An interactive slideshow of the wishes is available on Gitlab.

These sessions featured interviews from people in the Inkscape community. The interviewers asked guests about their Inkscape journey, how they discovered Inkscape, what they liked most about using Inkscape, among other questions. Guests answered that they use Inkscape for various things, some of them being designing board games, a children’s book for their loved ones, doing professional design work. One guest said they loved the feeling of freedom when designing with Inkscape. Another guest wanted a free vector graphics application, they stumbled upon Inkscape and found a bug. After reporting it, they ended up eventually contributing translations for their language.

After the interview ended, the room was opened to the chat so that people could ask the guests questions. The sessions went well over time as those in attendance wanted to keep the great Inkscape party going.

You can get involved with the Inkscape project, too, and help make the next 20 years even greater!

After months of waiting, we are finally ready to unbox the latest version of Inkscape... meet 1.4, the Geek edition, where accessibility and customization reign.

Inkscape project developers, most of them volunteer contributors from countries around the world, have been plugging away behind the scenes on new features, improving current ones, bug fixes and setting the stage for the arrival of GTK 4.

Let’s dig into some of the new and improved features that enable more customization and better accessibility in Inkscape in a cool, geeky sort of way. Inkscape Power Users, this one’s for you!

Filter Gallery Dialog

The Inkscape 1.4 Filter Gallery dialog is your new entry point into the world of filters. Head to the Filters menu to find it and your favorites more easily, with previews by category or by typing key words in the search bar. This includes those custom filters you’ve added – look for them in the Personal category. Accessibility features here include the ability to change the size of the preview of thumbnails.

Modular Grids

For those of you seeking the ultimate in symmetry and accuracy, you’ll find the new grid selector buttons a quicker, more visual way of identifying your grid of choice. For the new modular grids, you can adjust plenty of grid parameters separately, from height and width to horizontal and vertical gaps – including adjustments at the grid module (rectangle) level. Enable this option by heading to document properties.

Swatches Dialog

Inkscape’s Swatches dialog has a fresh new face. It now includes a drop-down menu with previews of color palettes. You can display them with their colors’ names as a list or a grid. For Power Users, you can now increase the tile size, too. Search for your custom swatches, or those of your customers, too. Import palettes from the dialog, including those from Adobe Color Book that use CIELAB colours, while support for those with CMYK is still limited for now. Transitioning from CMYK to RGB has been improved.

SVG Font Editor

For those of you who have a thing for fonts, Inkscape 1.4 is your new go-to for customization. You’ll find an easier route to buttons for sorting glyphs and removing pairs. Powerful customization at it’s finest in Inkscape!

Unified Font Browser

Inkscape is testing out a unified font browser preview. Activate this feature in Preferences and restart. After that, you will access visual previews for fonts with settings such as adding your own sample text. Check for particular font characteristics by searching fonts by collection type. Click on the one you want and watch it be applied to your text.

Customizable Handles

With Inkscape 1.4, you’ll now see that the on-canvas handles are customizable by size, colour, stroke width, outline and opacity. This will be updated live in Inkscape when the CSS file has been saved.

Shape Builder

You can now tackle quick edits on raster (pixel) images within Inkscape using the Shape Builder tool. Load an image and select sections that you want to isolate. Choose them with Shape Builder to clip them. Note that to edit them, you’ll need to release the clip and then unlink the clone. This tool is useful for a quick fix, isolating part or parts of an image quickly.

Object Properties Dialog

As of Inkscape 1.4, the Objective Attributes and Object Properties dialogs have been rolled up into one. This one-stop-shop is where you can change the different properties of objects, including rotations and corners.

Import & Export Updates

If you use Inkscape to develop and publish documents, you’ll be happy to know that you can now add links from one page to another within a PDF document–think table of contents.

Additionally, Inkscape 1.4 can now open Affinity Designer files, adding more versatility to the program.

Icon Sets

Welcome, Dash, the latest icon set to be accessible within Inkscape. For those of you who like customizing, you’ll appreciate this additional set of 500 plus icons to explore. These include cursors, both scalable and symbolic versions, that work on light and dark themes.

That concludes our brief wander through some of the top features included in Inkscape 1.4. For more information, the Inkscape 1.4 Release Notes are up to date to with information on all the changes included in this edition.

Get Inkscape 1.4 for Linux, Windows or macOS!

If you have questions for us, head to our web site and find our online community, where you can also find ways to get involved in the project.

In the meantime,
  Draw Freely.

We had a great Inkscape Summit in Rennes, France. Our three-day meeting was hosted by long-time Inkscaper's Elisa and Cédric in their school of design Activ.design

Five Inkscaper's travelled to the event (Marc, Mikekov, Adam Belis, S-Rafael, and Tav). Two more were present via video (Martin and René). Jonathon dropped in occasionally. And our hosts hung out with us when they weren't too busy preparing for LGM (Libre Graphics Meeting). In previous years we called these events "Hackfests", but have decided in order to be more inclusive to non-programmers and encourage greater partipation these events will be known as "Inkscape Summits".

These important events give the contributors of Inkscape a place where they can get some work done. Rafael [pictured left] is seen here working on some graphic user interface code at the event space. Mike, Adam, and Rafael spent a lot of time discussing and implementing UX designs. Marc did lots of merges, especially forward porting. We had great discussions on the future of Inkscape, including a plan for an improved Live Path Effects system (more of a Live Object system), better testing, etc..

During breaks and after the day, the contributors will go out for a meal and socialise. Rafael, Adam, Mikekov, Tav and Marc [pictured right] sit at a restaurant near the event space for lunch and get to know each other better.

All of these activities are funded by the Inkscape project, who provides travel and event expenses and run by one of the team. This is all funded by our kind donors who help the project cover the costs to run these important events. So a big thank you to all of you, you know who you are!

After the Inkscape Summit event, everyone was able to participate in the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) which happened directly afterwards. We will often try and organise our own physical meetings along side another conference or event. Tav [pictured left] is seen talking to other LGM attendees who will be contributors to other Free Software projects such as Blender, Krita, Penpot, etc. While smaller than in the past, there were still lots of great talks including talks on color, type, animation, and chocolate.

Meeting with the wider community of Free Software contributors helps us stay up to date with what's happening in the wider industry as well as meeting with some pretty cool people who help run a lot of the software which our users also depend upon. Big thanks for the organisers of LGM for running the event this year, which is the first in person event since Covid.

See you all next time!

 

We have a winner! Congratulations to the winning entry by artist Inkonic for their artwork "Inkscape's Path–Artist's Blossom". 

The theme this year was "Growth" and Inkonic's winning artwork depicted this wonderfully with branches and leaves growing directly out of the work of artists' hands using artists' tools ― literally drawing themselves and their worlds into existence and making them grow. Congratulations to Inkonic ― and thank you for helping Inkscape continue to grow!

We would also like to thank all of the artists who submitted artwork for the contest. Our deepest gratitude to you for showing myriad ways Inkscape can be used to create incredible artworks. These examples are invaluable to helping the project grow and thrive by inspiring and educating artists.

We encourage everyone to take a moment and download any of the artworks you find interesting and explore the objects, nodes, effects, layers, and groups that make up these complex artworks. And if you want to help out the Inkscape Project even more, you can review these artworks by testing the Inkscape 1.4 beta release that will feature this winning artwork here.

Finally, we'd like to extend a big thank you to all of the community members ― more than 250 of you! ― who cast votes in the initial round and selected the top finalists as well as the 23 Inkscape contributors served as the final round of judges for the 1.4 About Screen Contest.

If you’re interested in getting started with or better at using Inkscape check out this month’s challenge.

Thanks to all of you for helping Inkscape continue to grow. 

 Draw freely.

 

Announcing the About Screen Contest for Inkscape 1.4! Calling all artists! Each new version of Inkscape, we run a fun contest inviting all seasoned Inkscape artists and newcomers to participate in the "About Screen" contest. The About Screen is the image that you see when you click on Help → About in Inkscape to find more information about the version of the program installed on your device.

This release the topic is "GROWTH". This could be interpreted in many ways! Trees, hair, and grass grow. Children grow. How have you grown as an artist this year? How has the Inkscape project grown? How have the benefits of free software "grown" in your mind?

We are so excited to see what great art is submitted this year and excited to have artists be a part of it!

Keep in mind that the About Screen Contest is about much more than the About Screen. Submitted contest artwork is not only shared with the entire inkscape community, but is often featured in other places to help the project!

Entering the contest as an artist and/or voting for your favorites is a great way to help the Inkscape project continue to thrive! Each and every submission also helps us test the newest version of Inkscape.

Learn more about the contest here

Draw Freely.

Inkscape’s involvement in Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC) program is one of the ways the project helps to advance both learning and new and improved features in the program. We’re excited to be taking part in GSoC once more in 2024!

For more information on the timeline and details for applying to collaborate with Inkscape this year, head to our project page on Google's Summer of Code website.

If you’re curious to know more about what some of Inkscape’s GSoC students accomplished in 2023, keep reading!

Customize the appearance of your Canvas Controls

GSoC 2023 Inkscape student Sanidhya Singh was a sophomore undergraduate student in Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee), India.

Sanidhya spent the summer working on developing a customizable appearance for canvas controls under the mentorship of Inkscape core developer Marc Jeanmougin.

What are these canvas controls, you ask? If you’ve drawn a shape using the Pen tool and tried to later edit it using the Node Tool, you might have noticed the circular (or square) handles Inkscape provides to manipulate and transform the shape. These are called "canvas controls" or more commonly "node handles". The style of these controls has been the same since at least Inkscape 0.48, and was in need of a refresh – one that would enable the user to have more flexibility in changing the style. Sanidhya stripped out the old handle styling part and replaced it with an easily editable CSS file, so that users can now change styles by just editing the file. This also enabled better default colors for the controls which will hopefully land in Inkscape 1.4.

You can read more about Sanidhya's work.

Preparing behind the scenes for GTK4 Migration

GSoC 2023 student Vaibhav Malik is from New Delhi, India. Once again, he joined Inkscape devs who have been putting a lot of work into the GTK4 migration. GTK is the user interface toolkit Inkscape uses to draw things like text boxes, buttons, etc. on the screen. Inkscape currently uses GTK3 which is version 3 of the toolkit. The migration to the latest version of the toolkit - GTK4, is what Vaibhav worked on under the mentorship of Inkscape core developer Tavmjong Bah (Tav).

Vaibhav's changes are mostly under-the-hood changes so that Inkscape works as expected with GTK4. One noticeable user-facing change is the addition of popovers for smaller screens. Below a particular window size, Inkscape will automatically adjust the items in the toolbar so that they're still usable on a smaller screen!

You can read more about Vaibhav’s work.

Collaborating with Inkscape developers is a learning experience and helps our free and open source program to advance for all Inkscape users.

Reach out, ask questions and get involved with our global team of volunteer contributors!

Draw Freely.

The project has received multiple requests for confirmation from creators, asking us whether we have been reaching out to them about collaborations / partnerships. They have been approached by someone who used the name “Inkscape PhotoEditor,” which does not exist. This is not us. Any official invitations to collaborate from the project will be listed prominently on our website (i.e. here).

 

Consider the history of control over user files, whether for organisations or individuals

Think about all the documents you have created in your lifetime: School assignments. Work presentations and reports. Household budgets. Letters. Perhaps even a personal diary or your CV.

Now imagine this: a few years go by, and when you try to open one of those files, it doesn’t work. The software has disappeared. Or it has been updated and no longer supports that format. Or you have to pay to unlock it.

It’s not just frustrating. It’s a real problem. That’s why the Open Document Format (ODF) was created: it’s a file format that allows computers to save documents such as letters, spreadsheets and presentations. You can recognise these files by their extensions: .odt for text files, .ods for spreadsheets and .odp for presentations.

What makes ODF special is that it is an open, transparent format that doesn’t hide anything from users. This means that anyone can use it freely; no company owns or controls it; and it is designed to work with different software, even years later. In short, it gives you control over your documents.

Let’s look at some everyday situations in which ODF can be useful:

Long-term access: you write your memoirs or your family history. Ten years later, you want to read or share them. With ODF, you don’t have to worry about the software becoming unavailable or obsolete.

Barrier-free education: A teacher asks students to submit their assignments digitally. With ODF, there is no need to purchase expensive software, as you can use a free tool such as LibreOffice instead.

Job search and consulting: create your CV in an open format so that anyone, regardless of their operating system (Windows, macOS or Linux) or application, can open it without encountering any formatting errors. You don’t even have to buy the software.

Sharing files with other users: you can send a document to a colleague or family member and they can open it without any problems, regardless of the programme they use. This is the advantage of a format that does not “belong” to a single company.

Public services: official documents in an open format can be accessed by everyone forever without them having to purchase or update software.

Unfortunately, most people forego all this because they use formats such as .docx (Word) or .xlsx (Excel). These are proprietary formats exclusively owned by Microsoft and can change at any time depending on their business strategies. Microsoft may require a subscription fee for a specific version, as older files may not be compatible with newer ones.

Proprietary formats can also cause problems when documents are opened with a different version of the same application, as the text and images may move and the document may look different. Sometimes, files do not open because the format is not recognised. This is not only annoying, but also risky if the file is important.

This is known as ‘lock-in’, a strategy that prevents users from choosing the software they prefer because migrating to a different format could result in the loss of all their content.

ODF, on the other hand, means freedom of choice, no restrictions, reduced costs, privacy, openness to the future and trust in technology. You don’t need to be a technology expert to use it; you just need to understand why it was created and why it has continued to grow for 20 years. Using ODF is like saving your documents in your own safe: it won’t suddenly disappear or require you to pay a monthly fee.

ODF also means security and transparency. ODF files are ZIP containers that use simple XML syntax, which any user can understand. This makes security checks much easier, allowing for automation and integration with companies’ CMS/ERP systems.

The digital agenda has always emphasised open standards, interoperability, and data portability. ODF fits perfectly into this landscape, not only replacing .docx or .xlsx, but also rejecting software that treats user data as a product.

ODF gives users full control over their documents. This is not just a technical detail; it ensures that documents belong to their creators, not the software used to process them. ODF enables us to assert ownership of our documents.

In 2024, The Document Foundation and its global LibreOffice community undertook a variety of marketing initiatives aimed at increasing visibility, fostering community engagement, and driving adoption of LibreOffice

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 in Luxembourg

A major highlight of TDF’s 2024 marketing activities was the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference, held from October 10 to 12 in Luxembourg. The annual event brought together contributors from around the world, including developers, designers, documentation writers, translators, and marketers.

Marketing efforts for the conference included:

• A targeted social media campaign promoting the event’s location, speakers, and agenda.
• Outreach to local technology communities and universities in Luxembourg to boost participation.
• The creation of promotional graphics and materials highlighting the conference themes and goals.
• Live updates and content shared across LibreOffice’s social channels to engage a remote audience.

The conference acted as a vital showcase of LibreOffice’s progress, community strength, and future plans.

“Month of LibreOffice” Campaigns

Throughout May and November 2024, TDF organized its recurring “Month of LibreOffice” initiative. This campaign aimed to recognize and reward community contributors across various roles, including development, documentation, QA and marketing.

Participants who contributed during the campaign period were acknowledged through:

• Special edition badges awarded digitally.
• Public recognition via blog posts and social media.
• Incentives like stickers and merchandise shipped to selected contributors.

This initiative not only celebrated existing contributors but also attracted new participants interested in supporting open source software.

Launch of the LibreOffice Podcast Series

In November 2024, TDF launched its LibreOffice Podcast, a new platform to discuss topics related to LibreOffice and the wider world of open source software. The podcast aimed to:

• Share success stories from migrations to LibreOffice.
• Offer insights into FOSS marketing strategies.
• Feature interviews with developers and community leaders.
• Provide behind-the-scenes looks at the ongoing work within TDF.

The first episode focused on marketing strategies for FOSS, with discussions on how to engage institutions and governments in adopting LibreOffice.

Enhanced Social Media and Content Strategy

In 2024, TDF expanded and optimized its social media presence. Alongside its traditional platforms like Twitter (X) and Facebook, TDF increased its focus on:

• Mastodon: engaging the open-source community on federated social platforms.
• LinkedIn: Sharing professional success stories, including case studies on large-scale LibreOffice deployments.
• Regular posting of blog content, including release announcements, tutorials, and community spotlights.
• Short video clips and graphics to make content more accessible and visually engaging.

These efforts aimed to grow the project’s audience, particularly among decision-makers in public administration and enterprises.

Native Language Community Outreach

TDF placed a strong emphasis on supporting native language communities. The marketing team worked with volunteers worldwide to produce localized materials, including:

• Press releases for new LibreOffice versions.
• Social media templates and visual assets.
• Brochures explaining the benefits of LibreOffice in local contexts.

Several regions ran independent marketing initiatives, including:

• Nepal: workshops for students on using LibreOffice Writer to create professional resumes.
• India: local events demonstrating LibreOffice’s potential for government offices and educational institutions.

Workshops, Training and Community Events

Throughout the year, TDF organized workshops and training sessions aimed at onboarding new users and contributors. These included:

• Online training for translators and QA testers.
• Regional events offering hands-on experience with LibreOffice migrations.
• Webinars aimed at IT administrators exploring LibreOffice deployment in enterprise environments.

The Open Source Workshops helped public sector organizations understand the benefits of LibreOffice and how it can replace proprietary office suites.

Outreachy and Template Development

LibreOffice participated in the Outreachy program, with a focus on developing new templates for LibreOffice Writer. These templates included resumes, reports, and business documents aimed at improving the user experience and broadening appeal, particularly for users migrating from proprietary suites.

Marketing activities highlighted:

• How templates increase productivity.
• The contributions of new developers and designers participating in the Outreachy program.
• The availability of these templates through LibreOffice’s website and community channels.

Media and Press Relations

TDF continued its media relations work, distributing regular press releases covering:

• New LibreOffice releases and features.
• Major migrations by organizations and governments.
• Events such as LibreOffice Conference and Month of LibreOffice campaigns.

TDF’s press outreach focused on reinforcing LibreOffice’s position as a cost-effective, secure, and privacy-respecting alternative to proprietary office suites.

Download Statistics and User Adoption

The marketing efforts in 2024 yielded significant results:

• Download Milestone: by the end of 2024, LibreOffice surpassed 400 million cumulative downloads since its inception in 2011, with an average of 28.6 million downloads per year.
• Weekly Downloads: Weekly downloads approached 1 million, marking the highest figures since 2023.
• Public Sector Adoption: The German state of Schleswig-Holstein announced plans to migrate 30,000 PCs to LibreOffice, aiming for completion by 2026.

Conclusion

In 2024, through conferences, campaigns, podcasts, and media outreach, TDF advanced its mission of promoting free and open source software while making LibreOffice more accessible and trusted around the world. These marketing efforts not only amplified LibreOffice’s visibility but also demonstrated the value of community-driven open source projects in delivering professional-grade software solutions.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

An introduction to the Open Document Format

The documents we create today, whether reports, spreadsheets or presentations, are essential for communicating, sharing and storing knowledge. However, the format in which these documents are saved often goes unnoticed. This is where the Open Document Format (ODF) comes in. ODF is a technical standard and a tool that ensures documents remain accessible, editable and usable over time without being tied to a specific vendor or product.

Approved by OASIS as an open standard document format in May 2005 and by ISO/IEC in May 2006, ODF has been around for over 20 years. Despite 20 years having passed, most productivity software users are not familiar with the format and therefore do not use it, as it is not as widespread as its proprietary counterpart, Microsoft OOXML.

This means that a huge number of documents — equivalent to over 100 zettabytes of data in 2025 — are subject to the commercial strategies of a company and completely beyond the control of their authors. These authors may suddenly find themselves unable to manage their own content unless they use specific software.

This also means that the enormous wealth of information contained in these documents does not contribute to the growth of collective intelligence because they are limited in terms of interoperability due to being tied to a single, specific, proprietary software.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s touted backward compatibility feature prevents true innovation in document formats because the presence of proprietary elements from old binary formats, which are not included in the ODF standard, forces documents to remain with technologies that have long been obsolete and incompatible with future developments.

What is ODF?

ODF is an open standard for saving and exchanging office documents. It includes text files (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods), presentations (.odp), and other types of documents, such as drawings (.odg). Developed by OASIS, an organisation that promotes structured information standards, it was approved by ISO/IEC as the international standard ISO/IEC 26300 in 2006.

Put simply, ODF is a universal language for documents, ensuring they can be read and written by any compatible software without locking users into a single ecosystem.

To understand the importance of ODF, it is helpful to know how proprietary formats work. When a document is saved in a Microsoft format, such as .docx, or an Apple format, such as .pages, it is often designed to work best with that company’s software only. Over time, this can cause problems such as limited compatibility, vendor lock-in, and the risk of obsolescence if the proprietary format is abandoned or changed significantly, as older documents may become unreadable.

ODF avoids these problems. It is completely open and free, meaning that anyone can implement it in their software, and users can switch between tools without losing access to their files.

ODF is not limited to text documents, but includes a wide range of office document types, including .odt (OpenDocument Text) for text documents such as reports, letters and books; .ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) for data analysis, tables and financial models; .odp (OpenDocument Presentation) for presentations with visual content; .odg (OpenDocument Graphics) for diagrams and vector graphics, as well as documents containing text and images; and .odf (OpenFormula) for formulas used in ODS spreadsheets.

Each of these document types is structured in such a way as to allow maximum compatibility while maintaining formatting and advanced software features.

How does ODF compare with Microsoft document formats?

Feature	ODF	Microsoft (docx. xlsx, pptx)
Open Standard	Yes	No
Long Term Archiving	Solid Support	Risk of Format Changes Risk of Online Dependency
Offline Support	Fully Supported	Supported
Editable without Vendor Software	Yes	Limited

Common misconceptions about ODF

It is not as feature-rich as .docx or .xlsx

False. ODF supports complex formatting, styles, images, tables, charts, macros and more. Its feature set is robust and evolving thanks to contributions from a global community of developers and users.

No one uses ODF

This is also false. In fact, millions of users worldwide use ODF-compatible software every day. LibreOffice alone has tens of millions of active users worldwide.

It doesn’t work with my existing documents

ODF-compatible software, such as LibreOffice, can open, edit and export many formats, including .docx and .xlsx. Switching to ODF is easy and you won’t lose access to your existing files.

The future of ODF

The growing importance of digital documents in every sector, including education, public administration and business, is bound to impact the adoption of the ODF format because users cannot continue to use a format that disadvantages them in every way. Furthermore, the number of countries adopting policies based on open standards and demanding transparency and control over their data is growing all the time, and this can only lead to increased adoption of ODF in the long term.

Documents should belong to their authors, not to a software vendor through the file format used. In the case of a country, documents should belong to its citizens. ODF is the only effective way to regain control and ensure that data remains open, accessible and future-proof. ODF embodies the principles of digital freedom, collaboration, and user empowerment.

Whether you are an individual seeking control over your digital life, a teacher aiming to share knowledge using open tools to ensure its long-term availability to the community, a public official seeking long-term transparency, or a politician representing citizens’ interests, ODF is the smart, sustainable choice.

DISCLAIMER: Artificial Intelligence has helped in putting together background data in a matter of seconds, thus dramatically reducing the time needed to draft the article. I have over 4GB of background documents on my online storage, and although I have read most of them, it is impossible for my humble brain to retain all information. Here, Artificial Intelligence helps a lot, especially a 70 years old guy.

So we’re half-way through the Month of LibreOffice, May 2025. And already, 216 contributors have won cool LibreOffice sticker packs! Details on how to claim them will be provided at the end of the month, but if you don’t see your name (or username) on that page, it’s not too late to join…

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a:

• Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.

• First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 25.2.3”.

• Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.

• Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.

• Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.

• Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So, two more weeks to go! We’ll be posting more updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts…

The LibreOffice Google Summer of Code projects have been selected for 2025.

• Adam Seskunas – Implement Report Builder in C++: replacing the current Java-based Report Builder with a new solution will improve maintainability and remove one of the last remaining dependencies on Java.
• Karthik Godha – New dialog to edit Table Styles: Writer and Calc have a feature called AutoFormat styles with the possibility to add custom styles. This project will make it possible to edit existing table styles.
• Devansh Varshney – BASIC IDE code auto-completion: rudimentary auto-completion for BASIC macro authors is already available, but this project will make the feature much more helpful.
• Manish Bera – Python code auto-completion: currently there is no support at all for Python auto-completion when developing scripts for LibreOffice, so this will be quite a welcome addition.
• Mohamed Ali Mohamed – Rust UNO language binding: last year LibreOffice received support for Lua and the latest .NET and now it’s time to make it possible to use the API with Rust.
• Ujjawal Kumar – Import Markdown files into Writer: Markdown is a rather popular markup language for quickly formatting text in blog content, comments, chats and more. Requests to support it have increased recently, so it makes sense to tackle it.
• Shardul Vikram Singh – Rework Impress slideshow to use DrawingLayer primitives: this is one of those projects that are incomprehensible to most users, but really important for the long term maintenance of the code.

Good luck to the contributors – we appreciate their work on these important features and improvements! And thanks to our mentors for assisting them: Thorsten Behrens, Stephan Bergmann and Sarper Akdemir (allotropia); Rafael Lima; Jonathan Clark, Heiko Tietze, Xisco Faulí, Michael Weghorn and Hossein Nourikhah (TDF).

Between August 25 and September 1, contributors will submit their code, project summaries, and final evaluations of their mentors. Find out more about the timeline here, and check out more details about the projects on this page.

Our two main websites are vital sources of information for The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice software. We also use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

TDF website

The Document Foundation website provides general information about the foundation (overview, statutes, code of conduct, financials and reports) and its governance (board of directors, membership committee, members, advisory board, and engineering steering committee), and about LibreOffice certification, including a list of certified developers, and professionals for migrations and trainings.

During 2024, the foundation’s website was visited 98,499 times, with 146,456 page views – a slight reduction in visits but also a slight growth in page views from 2023. Continent-wise, the largest chunk of visits were from Europe (52%), followed by North America (24%) and Asia (16%). And regarding software: the most visits were from PCs using the Windows (65%) operating system, followed by GNU/Linux (10%) and macOS (8%) and devices uses Android (6.2%), while for browsers: Chrome had 39%, followed by Firefox (16%) and Microsoft Edge (15%).

LibreOffice website

The LibreOffice website provides information about the office suite and the document format, the various download options, how to get help, how to contribute to the project, events where users can get to know the LibreOffice community, and how to make a donation to support the project and the community.

In 2024, we continued to make improvements and tweaks to the website, updating the “Discover” and “New Features” sections of the site to reflect new versions of the software.

During 2024, the English-language LibreOffice website was visited 19,298,517 times (a 0.6% gain over 2023), with 46,065,236 page views (a 0.1% gain). Most visits were from Europe (52%), followed by Asia (20%), North America (15%) and South America (9%), from PCs using the Windows operating system (82%), followed by macOS (6%) and Linux (23%). Regarding web browsers, Chrome was the most popular (41%), followed by Microsoft Edge (29%) and Firefox (13%).

Blogs

TDF’s blogs (like this one) are essential for communicating activities inside and around the project, including new releases of LibreOffice, community events and support for other free and open source initiatives. In 2024, we used them to post regular interviews with community members and provide updates from team members about documentation, marketing, QA, design and more.

Blogs were also maintained by various native language communities including Japanese, Spanish, German and others. Thanks to the hard work of community members, we had press releases, tips and other articles translated into many languages, and picked up by local media organisations.

These native language blogs complement the information provided by the main blog in English, and by the two blogs managed by members of the design and the quality assurance projects, which provide updates about activities for the upcoming major releases.
In 2024, the blog had 100,180 visits and 131,174 page views – a drop in both cases of around 30% from the previous year. The press releases for LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8 were the most popular posts, followed by the posts about the German state of Schleswig-Holstein moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice.

Social media

In January 2024, our X (formerly known as Twitter) account (@LibreOffice) had 63,060 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 68,870. Our most popular posts were for major releases of LibreOffice, and news about migrations to the suite. We posted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.

In addition, we focused not only on our own posts, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice community members. We liked and reposted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we reposted popular older tweets, and responded to individual messages.

On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2024 we worked more on expanding our activities on our account @libreoffice@fosstodon.org, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 25,440 to 29,326. We also joined Bluesky in late 2023 thanks to invites from a community member, and by December 2024 our follower count had reached 2,900.

Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 63,348 page followers to 64,239. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards other social media platforms. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.

YouTube channel

Our YouTube channel grew from 20,638 subscribers and 3,243,107 video views in January 2024 to 22,586 subscribers and 3,534,370 video views by the end of the year. The most popular videos were the “New Features” videos for LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8, and we also added videos of talks, presentations and workshops from the LibreOffice Conference 2024.

At the end of 2024, we posted the first video from the new LibreOffice Podcast series, where Italo Vignoli and Mike Saunders from TDF talked about the challenges and opportunities in marketing free and open source software like LibreOffice. More podcasts are planned for 2025.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Quality Assurance (QA) is a cornerstone of the LibreOffice project, thanks to the activity of a large number of volunteers and the feedback of many users who help in reporting bugs and regressions

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

QA team work

In 2024, the QA team triaged thousands of bugs, bisected hundreds of regressions, and answered questions from countless bug reporters. As one of the most visible groups directly responding to end users, the QA team must be nimble and able to adapt to changes. In addition, it must deal with specific requests for help from other teams.

The QA team meets regularly on IRC on the #libreoffice-qa channel, which is the best medium for discussing bugs and regressions. The IRC channel provides an excellent opportunity to remain in close contact with team members, and to tutor new members in the art and skill of LibreOffice QA. This is bridged to the Telegram group.

During 2024, 5351 bugs were reported by 2463 users, which means 103 new bugs were reported every week on average. The QA team prepared monthly reports about their activity and posted on the QA blog.

Top 10 bug reporters

• Eyal Rozenberg (211)
• Gabor Kelemen (193)
• Mike Kaganski (137)
• Telesto (86)
• Regina Henschel (85)
• Xisco Faulí (82)
• Stéphane Guillou (78)
• peter josvai (75)
• Rafael Lima (72)
• Heiko Tietze (54)

Triaging

During 2024, 5086 bugs were triaged by 328 people. The top 10 bug triagers were:

• Stéphane Guillou (stragu) (762)
• Buovjaga (684)
• m_a_riosv (499)
• Heiko Tietze (374)
• V Stuart Foote (241)
• Mike Kaganski (232)
• Julien Nabet (186)
• Xisco Faulí (175)
• ady (144)
• Dieter (144)

Bibisecting

Also, during 2024, the QA team performed 561 bibisects of regressions by 30 people. The top 10 bisecters were:

• raal (121)
• Buovjaga (111)
• Stéphane Guillou (104)
• Xisco Faulí (91)
• Gabor Kelemen (24)
• Aron Budea (23)
• Timur (14)
• zcrhonek (10)
• Mike Kaganski (9)
• Justin L (8)

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

On May 1st, 2005, the Open Document Format (ODF) become an OASIS standard. One year after, it became an ISO/IEC standard. After two decades, it is the only true open standard for document formats available on the market, and the only one protecting users from proprietary lock in and ensuring a full control over contents. The presentation provides an overview over ODF features and explains why ODF should be used versus Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/w/2b9JeZw1M884V5BK21RioW

YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z-Xo9v9-1YU (please note that once you leave this blog to access the video, a different set of privacy rules will apply)

Open Document Format (ODF) has been designed as a document standard for the next 20-50 years, to liberate users from the lock-in strategy built into yesterday’s and today’s proprietary formats and foster interoperability. On the contrary, OOXML – approved by ISO/IEC in 2008 in a version never implemented by MS Office – has been designed as a document pseudo-standard format to propagate yesterday’s document issues and lock-in strategy for the next 20-50 years, to the detriment of users and interoperability.

The philosophy behind the ODF standard document format was to design a mechanism in a vendor neutral manner from the ground up, using existing standards wherever possible. Although this means that software vendors had to tweak their individual packages more than if they continued down their original routes, the benefits for interoperability were important enough to justify this objective. The OOXML pseudo-standard document format was designed by Microsoft for Microsoft products, and to interoperate with the Microsoft environment. Little thought appears to have been exercised for interoperability with non-Microsoft environments, or compliance with established vendor-neutral standards.

Berlin, 8 May 2025 – LibreOffice 24.8.7, the seventh and last minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free open source, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at www.libreoffice.org/download. LibreOffice is the only office suite that respects the privacy of the user, ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the content they create. It even allows deleting user related info from documents. In addition, it has a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those from ecosystem companies – are based. Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.
End users looking for manuals can download the LibreOffice 24.8 guides from the following link: books.libreoffice.org/.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with three or five year backporting of security patches, other dedicated value-added features and Service Level Agreements: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice 24.8.7 availability

LibreOffice 24.8.7 is available from www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (no longer supported by Microsoft) and Apple MacOS 10.15. Products for Android and iOS are at www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/.

LibreOffice 24.8 will reach its EOL (End of Life) in mid-June 2025. Users are encouraged to migrate to LibreOffice 25.2, which is now fully tested for all types of use in production. The current version is LibreOffice 25.2.3.

End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org. They can support the project by donating at www.libreoffice.org/donate.

Join us in Budapest and tell us what you’re doing with LibreOffice!

The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, presentations and workshops for this year’s LibreOffice conference in Budapest at ELTE’s Faculty of Informatics, co-organized by FSF.hu Foundation. The event will take place from 4 to 6 September, with an informal community meeting on 3 September. Whether you are an experienced presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to say about LibreOffice, the Document Liberation Project, the Open Document Format or the ODF Toolkit, we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be submitted by 15 June 2025 to ensure they are considered for inclusion in the conference programme.

The conference programme will be based on the following tracks

a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localisation, Documentation and Native Language Projects
d) Appealing LibreOffice: Usability, Design and Accessibility
e) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
f) Advocacy, promotion and marketing of LibreOffice

Presentations, case studies, workshops and technical talks will cover a topic in depth and last 30 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and last 5 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

Please submit your proposal – including a short description of contents and a short biography of yourself – to https://events.documentfoundation.org/. If you would like to give more than one talk, please submit a separate proposal for each one. Only software based on the LibreOffice Technology platform will be allowed on stage, while slide decks will be shared using the ISO standard ODP and PDF file formats.

If you need a VISA, please contact the organising team at conference@libreoffice.org as soon as possible to receive an invitation letter.

If you are unable to travel to Hungary and prefer to present remotely, please include a note in your proposal to allow the organisers to schedule your presentation (and organise a test session beforehand).

If you do not agree to make the data for the presentation available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Licence, please specify your terms. In order to make your presentation available on the TDF YouTube channel, please do not make use of copyrighted material (music, images, etc.) for your slide deck.

Of course, this is only the Call for Papers, but everyone is welcome to attend the talks and events! We’ll post again soon when registration is open…

Thank you for your participation!

Hello everyone,

Many thanks to our sponsors and to all of you who support the project with your donations.

Codenames

The codenames for the next releases of Linux Mint and LMDE were chosen:

• Linux Mint 22.2 will be called “Zara”
• LMDE 7 will be called “Gigi”

PewDiePie

We have a new user!

How many of us now? We don’t count. Dozens at least, dozens!

Welcome to Linux PewDiePie!

A hint of Blue in Mint-Y

We’re adding a little bit of blue in our theme.

This is common practice in UI design. It’s done on mobile, desktop and all over the web. Grey is rarely completely grey, it usually has a little bit more blue in it than red and green.

Take your color picker and check the grey on GitHub. It’s not #f8f8f8, it’s #f6f8fa. Firefox does that well, Google docs, Trello etc..

The reason this is done is to make grey slightly more metallic looking and appear more modern. Pure grey is neutral, it can be perceived as cold or warm based on its surroundings. By bumping the blue (or in the case of github both the green and the blue) we force it to look cold.

Here’s an interesting discussion on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/UXDesign/comments/1cd40iz/why_apples_systemwebsite_grey_shades_always_lean/

Another reason this makes the UI look more modern is because this is done a lot nowadays but it wasn’t done so much 10 years ago. Like with all new trends, sticking to past standards can make things feel outdated.

Interestingly libAdwaita also just did this.

If you update your Flatpak libAdwaita applications you’ll see they now use #222226 for dark and #ebebed for light.

Because there are many libAdwaita apps already in Flathub and since our own theme is already quite close to it in terms of colors,  we’re adapting Mint-Y to use the same colors.

The difference in the light theme is subtle. It probably wouldn’t be noticed by someone who wasn’t told this had been done. The headers go from #e8e8e8 to #ebebed.

The difference is more visible in the dark theme, which also affects dark apps and the panel and cinnamon clutter elements in the default theme. This one is going from #2b2b2b to #222226 and #404040 to #2e2e33. It looks more modern but also much softer than before.

These changes bring the following improvements:

• The themes look more modern
• The dark theme and Cinnamon elements are softer and much nicer looking
• Flatpak libAdwaita applications fit in a little bit better since they use the same colors

Accent Colors

We made a small change to the XDG Desktop Portal XApp to support accent colors.

The XApp desktop portal simply scans the GTK theme for a named color called “accent_color”. If this color is present it provides it via the XDG Settings API.

Put simply this changes the accent color in Flatpak libAdwaita applications based on your chosen GTK theme.

This works in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. All that is needed is for the theme to define its “accent_color”.

Note to theme artists: This is a one-liner in your GTK CSS.

@define-color accent_color #9ab87c;

libAdwaita

A year ago we complained about libAdwaita, not because it was bad, but because it didn’t support us. Applications made with this library only properly integrated with GNOME and broke functionality in Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.

With the release of Linux Mint 22, GNOME Apps which used libAdwaita were downgraded back to their GTK3 versions so that they could continue to function properly in the desktop environments we support. This was a temporary solution until these applications either got replaced, removed, forked, or until we found a way to continue to use them.

I know our audience isn’t ready to let theming die. It would be extremely unpopular right now if we were to remove theme selection. And since we provide it, it has to work. We cannot ship with a desktop that provides theme selection and a core set of applications which violate it.

As shown above, we’ve updated Mint-Y to use the same colors as libAdwaita. We also made the libAdwaita accent color follow the theme. This helps the integration but it’s only a small step towards properly integrating these applications. It doesn’t solve the issue with window controls and doesn’t help with other themes.

Whether we downgrade or fork applications, I know many of the GNOME developers are as sad as we are about this fragmentation and duplication of efforts. We were talking about extracting epub support in Xreader last week and making a new app. It would take between a week and a month to achieve the level of functionality we see in something like Foliate, but what’s the point long-term? Wouldn’t it be better for Foliate to work outside of GNOME and for us to use it?

Within our XApp discussions we talk about Qt, GTK3, application alternatives, forks and rewrites. What we looked at recently is slightly different. How do we make GNOME apps continue to work outside of GNOME?

Is there anything actually wrong with them once they follow the theme and provide proper window controls?

We gave it a try. We added libAdwaita stylesheets in Mint-X and Mint-Y and made a few changes in libAdwaita to not use its own stylesheet.

As you can see, the layout and style of libAdwaita widgets is different than in traditional GTK3 applications. It’s more touch friendly with sidepanes, split navigation headerbars rather than menubars and toolbars. It works really well for some of the apps though.

In the GIF above, gnome-calendar, gnome-characters and foliate are libAdwaita applications. They integrate really well.

If we apply these patches to libAdwaita we probably won’t need to continue to downgrade the GNOME applications.

Upstream and long-term, if we continue to use libAdwaita applications we probably need an XApp platform lib similar to libAdwaita, either in the form of a soft-forks (libs and/or apps which are often rebased on upstream) or in the form of an extension library (something that extends libAdwaita, similar to libGranite).

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in March:

A total of $14,716 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 523 donors:

$500 (8th donation), Matthew P.
$250 (3rd donation), Tom K.
$212, Daniel C.
$159, Sylvain L.
$150, ROMAN T.
$130 (7th donation), J aka “look but don’t touch. Thank you”
$127, Norbert B.
$125, Charles H. C.
$106 (2nd donation), Dennis K.
$106 (2nd donation), Thomas F.
$106, Anonyme A.
$106, Harland F.
$106, Jiří B.
$106, Markus H.
$106, Raiko Z.
$106, Tero J.
$106, Thomas J.
$106, Tobias R.
$100 (7th donation), Jaxon L.
$100 (7th donation), Konrad W.
$100 (7th donation), Sivaguru
$100 (6th donation), James F.
$100 (5th donation), Jamison G.
$100 (2nd donation), Thomas P.
$100, Alan F. T.
$100, Christina S.
$100, Ethan D.
$100, Jason R.
$100, Leon K.
$100, Network Informatics Inc
$100, Nigel A.
$84, Simon D.
$79 (11th donation), Jacques P.
$79, Florian S.
$76, James W.
$74 (3rd donation), Peter P.
$63 (2nd donation), David M.
$53 (8th donation), Richard H.
$53 (5th donation), Birgit B.
$53 (3rd donation), jo
$53 (3rd donation), Willem L.
$53 (2nd donation), Anonymous
$53 (2nd donation), Joachim H.
$53 (2nd donation), Laobhan
$53 (2nd donation), Matthijs S.
$53, Anonymous A.
$53, Baptiste C.
$53, Felix K.
$53, Frank W.
$53, Gerd W.
$53, Jakub B.
$53, JAUME E. E. P.
$53, Lars L.
$53, Maik T.
$53, MALCOLM T.
$53, Marcus B.
$53, Markus N.
$53, Martin E.
$53, michael H.
$53, MICHAEL J.
$53, Nicolas O.
$53, Olaf P.
$53, Poppy
$53, SIMONA B.
$53, Stefan K.
$53, Thomas G.
$53, Thomas K.
$51 (20th donation), Adam K.
$50 (19th donation), John Mc aka “Land Research Project”
$50 (6th donation), Clark R.
$50 (6th donation), Gerard S.
$50 (6th donation), Lynn H.
$50 (6th donation), Mothy
$50 (4th donation), Gregory A.
$50 (4th donation), Norman K.
$50 (3rd donation), Anthony C. aka “Ciak”
$50 (3rd donation), Beatrice G.
$50 (3rd donation), Brenda C.
$50 (3rd donation), Carlos L.
$50 (3rd donation), Donald L.
$50 (3rd donation), Frank J.
$50 (3rd donation), Robert L.
$50 (3rd donation), William E. aka “Bill”
$50 (2nd donation), Brian S.
$50 (2nd donation), Kris J.
$50 (2nd donation), Michael T.
$50 (2nd donation), Paul J. C.
$50 (2nd donation), Wade L.
$50, Alejandro E. G. V.
$50, Declan S.
$50, Derek M.
$50, Frank B.
$50, Gary W.
$50, Hallet B. I.
$50, James W.
$50, Jasmin K.
$50, John M.
$50, Kellee C.
$50, Kevin H.
$50, Mark P.
$50, Michael S.
$50, Mikko-Ilkka P. H.
$50, Nancy W.
$50, Patrick O.
$50, Peter G.
$50, Peter G.
$50, Phill R.
$50, Ronald F.
$50, Shu Hai Teng
$50, Sim%F3n Benito Stuardo Novoa
$50, suzanne E.
$50, Verne P.
$50, Wally Hale
$42 (2nd donation), F. S.
$42, Andreas N.
$42, Cazelle
$42, Szlovak J.
$42, Tony M.
$42, Wolfgang S.
$40 (10th donation), Robert T.
$38, Fabrice D.
$37, Luka L.
$35 (17th donation), B. H. .
$35 (12th donation), John Eady
$35 (5th donation), P W E.
$33, Alexis F.
$31 (6th donation), R. Sch.
$31 (2nd donation), Fernando M.
$31, ALEXANDROS K.
$31, CASALINI M.
$31, Emilie G.
$31, Francien V. D.
$31, Jonas K. D. L. R.
$31, Pélage
$30 (2nd donation), Abu
$30 (2nd donation), Jonathan N.
$30, debashis B.
$30, Marco V.
$26 (70th donation), Michael R.
$26 (2nd donation), Hans-werner J.
$26, Benjamin M.
$26, Heiko P.
$26, Klaus S.
$26, Martin D.
$26, Martin W.
$26, R. O. P.
$26, Tiago N.
$25 (49th donation), Linux Mint Sverige
$25 (16th donation), Donna B.
$25 (8th donation), Mihnea Rădulescu
$25 (8th donation), Timothy L.
$25 (7th donation), Chuck G.
$25 (6th donation), Antonio John Ettorre aka “AJ”
$25 (5th donation), John N.
$25 (2nd donation), David W.
$25, Adam Y. W.
$25, Collum C. L.
$25, Colten B.
$25, Daniel d. A.
$25, David P. G.
$25, Garry D.
$25, Matthew C.
$25, Nicholas K.
$25, RENEE A. R.
$22 (4th donation), Pj Sylvia.
$22, Tate G.
$21 (24th donation), Stefan W.
$21 (19th donation), Benjamin W. aka “UncleBens”
$21 (13th donation), Brandon W.
$21 (7th donation), Artur K.
$21 (5th donation), Juri N. aka “Electronic music connoisseur”
$21 (4th donation), Clifford C.
$21 (3rd donation), David K.
$21 (3rd donation), Declan K.
$21 (3rd donation), Dirk S.
$21 (3rd donation), Elisabeth D.
$21 (3rd donation), Giordano A.
$21 (3rd donation), John R.
$21 (3rd donation), John S.
$21 (3rd donation), Jörg B.
$21 (3rd donation), Matthias K.
$21 (3rd donation), Tim S.
$21 (3rd donation), Ulrich J.
$21 (2nd donation), Alexandre R.
$21 (2nd donation), Alexandros D.
$21 (2nd donation), Armin K.
$21 (2nd donation), Ben Coyote
$21 (2nd donation), Cyril A.
$21 (2nd donation), Denick M.
$21 (2nd donation), Ester V.
$21 (2nd donation), Gunnar H.
$21 (2nd donation), Jochen M.
$21 (2nd donation), Renato P.
$21 (2nd donation), Salvatore C.
$21, aka “Denali”
$21, Adam D.
$21, Alexander B.
$21, Andrej D.
$21, Anne-Christine U.
$21, Arthur M.
$21, Bernd E.
$21, Bruno J.
$21, CARLOS H. N.
$21, Christian K.
$21, Christoph K.
$21, Christophe C.
$21, christophe O.
$21, david G.
$21, David L.
$21, David L. V. aka “12elotro”
$21, didier B.
$21, Enrico Pitea aka “Zippex”
$21, Frazer
$21, G%FCnther H.
$21, giovanni A.
$21, Guenther K.
$21, Horst D.
$21, I%F1aki F.
$21, J M. P.
$21, James I.
$21, Jens K.
$21, Johan R.
$21, Johannes J.
$21, Jonathan S.
$21, Jose G.
$21, Kim F.
$21, Konstantin M.
$21, Lee P.
$21, LEVENTE V.
$21, M J. P.
$21, Markus F.
$21, Markus S.
$21, Martin B.
$21, Martin D.
$21, Mateusz M.
$21, Matthew K.
$21, Michael B.
$21, Michael H.
$21, Michael W. M.
$21, Paolo Bee
$21, Patrick P.
$21, Paul G.
$21, Peter N.
$21, Robert V. D.
$21, Roland H.
$21, Sam H.
$21, Sebastian L.
$21, sisko M.
$21, Stefan R.
$21, Stephan R.
$21, Sven T.
$21, Toms Web Solutions
$21, Wil L.
$21, Yixue W.
$20 (66th donation), Bryan F.
$20 (51st donation), Stefan M. H.
$20 (32nd donation), vagrantcow
$20 (14th donation), Carl K.
$20 (11th donation), Lamont C.
$20 (10th donation), Daniel V. M.
$20 (9th donation), Eric W. aka “powerwagon75”
$20 (8th donation), Chris B.
$20 (7th donation), Eric W.
$20 (6th donation), Alex S.
$20 (6th donation), Allen S.
$20 (6th donation), Jim W.
$20 (6th donation), Mark C.
$20 (6th donation), Wladyslaw Tom Tomkiewicz
$20 (5th donation), Cheryl Meril, Notary Public
$20 (5th donation), Keith M.
$20 (4th donation), Eric H.
$20 (4th donation), Jack H.
$20 (4th donation), Vincent D.
$20 (3rd donation), Larry G.
$20 (2nd donation), Bergis H.
$20 (2nd donation), M Jay K.
$20 (2nd donation), Orville M G.
$20 (2nd donation), Thomas T.
$20 (2nd donation), Vincent A.
$20, Andrew
$20, Anthony C.
$20, Arjun J.
$20, Bartosz P.
$20, BK
$20, Bradley I.
$20, Chris H.
$20, Daniel R.
$20, Dean D.
$20, Ian D.
$20, Jason T.
$20, Jerry M. H.
$20, Jin Z.
$20, John K.
$20, John R.
$20, Madison W.
$20, Marc N.
$20, Mark S.
$20, matthew V.
$20, Reed Love
$20, Richard G.
$20, Stanley K.
$20, Terry D.
$20, Vernard E.
$20, Winston M.
$19, Stephen P.
$18 (4th donation), Piermarcello P.
$18, zoomonus
$17, Christoph aka “Stoffelchris”
$16 (85th donation), Andreas S.
$15 (105th donation), Johann J.
$15 (9th donation), Alexander H.
$15 (9th donation), Florian P.
$15, Andrej S.
$15, KENNETH W.
$15, Thaha J.
$15, Viktor S.
$12, Carsten B.
$12, Thejas L. U.
$11 (8th donation), Brian H.
$11 (4th donation), aka “mw-wonder”
$11 (4th donation), Alessandro S.
$10 (108th donation), Thomas C.
$10 (57th donation), Peter E.
$10 (52nd donation), Philip Woodward
$10 (35th donation), Tugaleres.com
$10 (17th donation), Thevirtua
$10 (16th donation), Christian B.
$10 (14th donation), Philip E.
$10 (13th donation), Karlheinz R.
$10 (12th donation), Axel R.
$10 (12th donation), Axel R. aka “Airwave”
$10 (12th donation), TONY aka “STRUZZIN ELECTRONICS”
$10 (11th donation), Michiel B. aka “Fairyland Ironwolves”
$10 (9th donation), Donatas Dainys
$10 (9th donation), JvdB
$10 (9th donation), Tom M.
$10 (8th donation), Jacques V.
$10 (8th donation), Roy S.
$10 (7th donation), Dino G.
$10 (7th donation), Marco B. aka “Erouc”
$10 (7th donation), Michael W.
$10 (6th donation), Kjerkreit Ytre, Anders Kiær
$10 (6th donation), Daniel H.
$10 (6th donation), Erik L.
$10 (6th donation), Gary R.
$10 (6th donation), Joseph G.
$10 (6th donation), Steven L.
$10 (6th donation), Tomasz K.
$10 (5th donation), Carlo R.
$10 (5th donation), Robert S.
$10 (5th donation), Tommy H.
$10 (4th donation), Axel P.
$10 (4th donation), Dafydd F.
$10 (4th donation), David G.
$10 (4th donation), Edward G.
$10 (4th donation), Fernando A. P.
$10 (4th donation), Gene E.
$10 (4th donation), Guillaume M.
$10 (4th donation), Mario M.
$10 (4th donation), Simon M.
$10 (4th donation), Tristan V.
$10 (3rd donation), Abe Z.
$10 (3rd donation), Artem Ignatyev aka “ZaZooBred”
$10 (3rd donation), Bruno L.
$10 (3rd donation), Craig D.
$10 (3rd donation), David J.
$10 (3rd donation), Francis S.
$10 (3rd donation), George P.
$10 (3rd donation), James G.
$10 (3rd donation), M.B.
$10 (3rd donation), Mike A.
$10 (3rd donation), Timothy L.
$10 (2nd donation), Christian G.
$10 (2nd donation), Christian O.
$10 (2nd donation), Devin S.
$10 (2nd donation), Diego Moya
$10 (2nd donation), Gerhard K.
$10 (2nd donation), Gunnar A.
$10 (2nd donation), Joseph M.
$10 (2nd donation), Mauro D.
$10 (2nd donation), Michael M.
$10 (2nd donation), Terry S.
$10 (2nd donation), Umberto B.
$10 (2nd donation), Vanderlei G. D. S.
$10, aka “Mint supporter”
$10,
$10, Adam J. V. R.
$10, Adithya
$10, Adriano C.
$10, Alain C.
$10, Aldo Acquistapace aka “Aldo.acqui”
$10, Alexis G. G.
$10, Alfio G.
$10, Alfonso F. aka “alf”
$10, ALTAMIR J.
$10, Anastasios A.
$10, andrej B.
$10, Anel S.
$10, ARIS J. J. N.
$10, Arne J.
$10, Askeldaja
$10, B.N. B.
$10, bartolameotti D.
$10, Bram B.
$10, bruno B.
$10, Capital Region Technology and Computer Support
$10, carlo Z.
$10, Carlos G.
$10, Chris S.
$10, CHRISTOS T.
$10, CLAUDE V.
$10, Constantin R.
$10, Daniel A. L. H.
$10, Daniel H.
$10, Dave J.
$10, Dener L. D. S.
$10, Dennis J.
$10, Didier F.
$10, Dirk N.
$10, Edward L.
$10, Eugen S.
$10, Felix P.
$10, Frank H.
$10, Geoffrey N.
$10, Giancarlo M.
$10, Hugo P.
$10, Ingo W.
$10, John G.
$10, Juan S. G.
$10, LORENZO A.
$10, M%E1rcio F.
$10, Manfred R.
$10, Marian P.
$10, Mario M.
$10, Mario R.
$10, Marlon R.
$10, Mateusz G.
$10, Matthias E.
$10, Michaela H.
$10, Michel W.
$10, MIGUEL A. A. G.
$10, Norberto C. N.
$10, Oliver S.
$10, Patrick G.
$10, Paul R.
$10, Peter K.
$10, Rainer B.
$10, Ramiro M.
$10, Randall R.
$10, Reinhart S.
$10, riccardo G.
$10, Richard M.
$10, Rodrigo C.
$10, ROMANAZZI G.
$10, Salvatore C.
$10, Salzgrotte Meissen
$10, Silvio E.
$10, Spencer D.
$10, Stefan L.
$10, Sydney C.
$10, Thomas S.
$10, Tony A.
$10, Udo S.
$10, valentino U.
$10, Vasco K. aka “Vascoder”
$10, Werner B.
$10, werner B.
$10, Yaroslav V.
$10, Yasir R.
$10, Yogerlan L. A.
$8, Matija K.
$196 from 51 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Patrons:

Linux Mint is proudly supported by 1,559 patrons, for a sum of $4,149 per month.

To become a Linux Mint patron, please visit https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint

Hi everyone,

Before we start with the news, I’d like to thank all the people who donate, sponsor and contribute in various ways to our project. Many thanks to all of you!

Note: The features which are previewed in this post are planned for upcoming releases. They are not available right now.

Searching for files in Nemo

The Nemo file manager was improved.

Its search functionality was enhanced. A new filter was added to find files using regular expressions matching their filenames.

Cinnamon in Wayland

We’re working on adding support for keyboard layouts and input methods to Cinnamon in Wayland.

Will this be included in the next release? Hopefully.

It’s functional but it’s not fully ready yet. Although it’s great news for Wayland compatibility, it can impact toolkit compatibility and input methods for Asian languages. We need a little bit more time to finalize it and properly test it.

OEM Support in LMDE

LMDE 7, which will be based on the next version of Debian Stable, will come with full support for OEM installations.

Thanks to OEM installs, Linux Mint can be pre-installed on computers which are sold throughout the World. It’s a very important feature and it’s one of the very few remaining things which wasn’t supported by LMDE.

OEM stands for “Original Equipment Manufacturers”. It’s used to refer not only to manufacturers but to any company big or small which sells computers. This feature is also used by individuals who either donate or sell their computers.

When you prepare a computer to be sold, you don’t know its future user. You can’t select the username or the password. Big companies might not even know the user’s language, timezone or keyboard layout. So this feature allows the system to be pre-installed on the computer, without selecting user details.

These details are later asked to the user via a first-run wizard when the computer is turned on.

CJS

We’re changing how we handle version numbers for the JavaScript engine that powers the Cinnamon desktop.

Previously, our JavaScript interpreter (CJS) shared the same version number as the Cinnamon desktop environment and was only updated when Cinnamon itself was updated.

Moving forward, CJS will be versioned according to the Mozilla JavaScript engine it uses, and we’ll update it independently from Cinnamon. This means:

• Updates can happen more frequently and efficiently
• New JavaScript engine improvements can be added without waiting for a full Cinnamon release
• The desktop environment can work with multiple versions of the JavaScript engine

This change will especially benefit Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu, making it easier for them to ship Cinnamon without having to maintain multiple versions of the Mozilla JavaScript engine.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

Donations in February:

A total of $14,904 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 502 donors:

$1000 (7th donation), Mikhail Chabanov
$250 (2nd donation), Gary S.
$216, Anna V.
$216, Christian F.
$200 (3rd donation), Curt B.
$200, David Z.
$108 (10th donation), Christian G. aka “Chrissy”
$108 (5th donation), Thomas I.
$108 (2nd donation), Klaus J.
$108 (2nd donation), Werner F.
$108, Anneliese R.
$108, Dirk B.
$108, Michael A.
$106, ossian B.
$100 (11th donation), John M.
$100 (11th donation), Timothy P.
$100 (3rd donation), Christopher G.
$100 (3rd donation), Ronald W.
$100, Artem K.
$100, Catherine H.
$100, Christopher W.
$100, Donald P.
$100, Lawrence L.
$100, Michael R.
$100, Philipp M.
$100, Prateek S.
$100, Ryan G.
$100, Stephen L.
$81, Michael P.
$75 (6th donation), David B.
$75 (4th donation), Warren A.
$68 (6th donation),
$65, Ralf H.
$60 (13th donation), James L.
$54 (9th donation), Jyrki A.
$54 (9th donation), Stoyan
$54 (7th donation), Thomas M.
$54 (4th donation), Christof S.
$54 (4th donation), Hubert F.
$54 (4th donation), Joost S.
$54 (4th donation), Rolf H.
$54 (3rd donation), Alain M.
$54 (3rd donation), John F.
$54 (3rd donation), Michel B.
$54 (2nd donation), Bernhard M.
$54 (2nd donation), Kai G.
$54, aka “Hp1200”
$54, Albert van Alphen aka “Phoerax”
$54, Andrea L.
$54, Benedikt H.
$54, Christopher C.
$54, Gerret S.
$54, Javier P.
$54, Job S.
$54, Karsten H.
$54, Lotte L.
$54, Manuel B.
$54, Marc L.
$54, Marcel F.
$54, Markus R.
$54, Massimo R.
$54, Michael H.
$54, Michael M.
$54, Nadine B.
$54, Rico B.
$54, Simon Speich
$54, Stefan R.
$54, Wolfram K.
$53 (2nd donation), Yusuf D.
$53, ALAN M.
$53, G D. W.
$53, Mar I.
$50 (10th donation), Greg C.
$50 (10th donation), John B.
$50 (7th donation), Dean R.
$50 (7th donation), W G. M.
$50 (5th donation), Jason B.
$50 (5th donation), Mothy
$50 (4th donation), Alan L.
$50 (3rd donation), Andri A.
$50 (3rd donation), Guillermo A.
$50 (3rd donation), John D.
$50 (3rd donation), Neal C.
$50 (2nd donation), Brian Milot Sr
$50 (2nd donation), Anthony C. aka “Ciak”
$50 (2nd donation), Benjamin P.
$50 (2nd donation), Richard M.
$50, ANDREW H.
$50, Arthur S.
$50, Brian D.
$50, BRIAN N.
$50, David T.
$50, Eric K.
$50, Frank S.
$50, Geekazon.com
$50, James H.
$50, Kelley W.
$50, Kira S.
$50, Mathieu D.
$50, Max
$50, Michael K.
$50, Mitch N.
$50, Monica R.
$50, Nils T.
$50, Rob F. aka “CheekinRob”
$50, Suzanne S.
$50, Thomas W.
$50, Travis M.
$50, WILLIAM M.
$49 (7th donation), Fred W.
$45 (2nd donation), Hesham A.
$45, Nicholas A.
$44 (4th donation), Juri N. aka “Electronic music connoisseur”
$43 (14th donation), Roger aka “GNU/Linux werkgroep”
$43 (2nd donation), Claire P.
$43, Lele
$40 (3rd donation), Leah M.
$40 (2nd donation), Daniel P.
$38 (8th donation), Vittorio F.
$38, Michael W.
$37, Frank N.
$35 (4th donation), P W E.
$35, Timothy K.
$32 (16th donation), Anthony M.
$32 (10th donation), Alexander M.
$32 (4th donation), Jean-claude M.
$32 (4th donation), Paul R.
$32 (3rd donation), A. P. .
$32 (3rd donation), Martin B.
$32 (2nd donation), Daniel M.
$32 (2nd donation), Daniel T.
$32 (2nd donation), John B.
$32, Andreas K.
$32, David M.
$32, Wulf S L.
$31, Tony D.
$30 (3rd donation), Devon B.
$30, Calvin N.
$30, Eduardo N. aka “edunkt”
$30, Jeffrey B.
$30, Kevin P.
$29 (4th donation), Birger M.
$29, Richard K.
$27 (23rd donation), John K. aka “jbrucek”
$27 (8th donation), Jonathan. H
$27 (6th donation), Peter M.
$27 (2nd donation), Jürgen N.
$27, Lars B.
$27, Marcello M.
$27, Mr. R.
$25 (48th donation), Linux Mint Sverige
$25 (19th donation), Richard N.
$25 (13th donation), John W.
$25 (7th donation), Mihnea Rădulescu
$25 (5th donation), Miles S. P.
$25 (4th donation), John N.
$25 (4th donation), Richard T. aka “RichT54”
$25 (3rd donation), JeffK969
$25 (3rd donation), Mr C. aka “oldpeculier”
$25 (3rd donation), Pablo J.
$22 (23rd donation), Stefan W.
$22 (19th donation), Marek S.
$22 (10th donation), Francis N.
$22 (9th donation), Bobcam Computer Solutions aka “Rob”
$22 (8th donation), Maurice G. aka “guilmau”
$22 (7th donation), Francesc M. C.
$22 (7th donation), Holger B.
$22 (6th donation), Artur K.
$22 (4th donation), Michael M.
$22 (3rd donation), Willem G. D. L.
$22 (2nd donation), Andreas O.
$22 (2nd donation), Bernd Z.
$22 (2nd donation), Börje Å.
$22 (2nd donation), Gerard W.
$22 (2nd donation), Jean-B. N.
$22 (2nd donation), Michael R.
$22 (2nd donation), Oleksandr P.
$22 (2nd donation), Sylvain Brunerie
$22 (2nd donation), Thorsten S.
$22 (2nd donation), Vladimir S.
$22 (2nd donation), Volkmar G.
$22, Attila L.
$22, Bernd B.
$22, Bernd M.
$22, Cesar B.
$22, Christoph K.
$22, Daniel K.
$22, Davy V.
$22, Dieter L.
$22, Emil H.
$22, Florian H.
$22, Gerard C.
$22, Giampaolo N.
$22, Hugo Z.
$22, Imrich P.
$22, Janis L.
$22, Jefferson F.
$22, Joerg A.
$22, Klaus K.
$22, Laurent R.
$22, Leonardo S.
$22, Luis P.
$22, Mads Damgaard M.
$22, Marco F.
$22, Martin F.
$22, Michael W.
$22, Olcay Ö.
$22, Patrick L.
$22, Peter H.
$22, Peter L.
$22, Raphaël A.
$22, René H.
$22, Rico D.
$22, Rob T.
$22, Robert E.
$22, Robert M.
$22, Robert P.
$22, Rodion S.
$22, Sebastian P.
$21 (6th donation), Mario N.
$21 (4th donation), Lawrence K.
$21 (4th donation), Rienk R.
$21 (3rd donation), Johnny B.
$21 (2nd donation), Andrea V.
$21, Basil aka “Cätch”
$21, M
$21, Manuel L.
$21, Marcel
$21, Marcus R.
$21, Mario O.
$21, MICHELE B.
$21, Oliver J.
$21, Stichting Elektoor
$20 (45th donation), John D.
$20 (24th donation), Pawel M.
$20 (10th donation), Mark R.
$20 (7th donation), Ray W.
$20 (6th donation), Andrew D.
$20 (6th donation), Bezantnet, L.
$20 (6th donation), Eric W.
$20 (5th donation), Richard W.
$20 (4th donation), Alonzo J.
$20 (4th donation), Daniel S.
$20 (4th donation), David P.
$20 (4th donation), Geoff A.
$20 (4th donation), Martin F.
$20 (4th donation), Simon H.
$20 (4th donation), Steven M.
$20 (3rd donation), All-Access Customer
$20 (3rd donation), Christopher O.
$20 (3rd donation), Christopher W.
$20 (3rd donation), Darwin H.
$20 (3rd donation), Eric H.
$20 (3rd donation), John R.
$20 (3rd donation), Leela A.
$20 (3rd donation), Perry B.
$20 (2nd donation), Adam F.
$20 (2nd donation), DH
$20 (2nd donation), Jacob L.
$20 (2nd donation), Luke M.
$20 (2nd donation), Oren K.
$20, 2MC Home Solutions
$20, Andrew R.
$20, Brett H.
$20, Clinton B.
$20, Cynthia T.
$20, Dale B.
$20, David P.
$20, Dylan C.
$20, Earl P.
$20, Ernesto G.
$20, Frederick B.
$20, George A. R.
$20, George Quentin H.
$20, Jack C.
$20, Julian L.
$20, Max R.
$20, Steven R.
$20, T J S.
$20, Timothy D.
$16 (84th donation), Andreas S.
$15 (104th donation), Johann J.
$15 (14th donation), Fred B.
$15 (9th donation), Bogdan P.
$15, Alexander F.
$15, K V
$15, Kenneth S.
$15, Onerahtokon M.
$13 (2nd donation), Bernd S.
$13, Stefan B.
$12 (13th donation), Bengt Falke aka “Falke”
$12 (3rd donation), Alessandro S.
$12, Martin B.
$11 (58th donation), Daniel S.
$11 (45th donation), Thomas R.
$11 (34th donation), Tugaleres.com
$11 (32nd donation), Denys G. aka “GD Next”
$11 (18th donation), Adis H.
$11 (17th donation), Francois B. aka “Makoto”
$11 (15th donation), Frank J.
$11 (15th donation), Robert W.
$11 (14th donation), Alan B.
$11 (14th donation), Ronald S.
$11 (9th donation), Alfred H.
$11 (9th donation), Antoni Aloy Torrens
$11 (8th donation), Jeanmichel T.
$11 (8th donation), Jerome M.
$11 (7th donation), Mark W.
$11 (6th donation), H.V. L.
$11 (5th donation), Frank H.
$11 (5th donation), Jorge F. M.
$11 (4th donation), Gines S.
$11 (4th donation), Marco Z.
$11 (4th donation), Michele D.
$11 (4th donation), Peter S.
$11 (3rd donation), Andreas H.
$11 (3rd donation), Arvidas S.
$11 (3rd donation), Hakan C.
$11 (3rd donation), Matthew D.
$11 (2nd donation), Artem Ignatyev aka “ZaZooBred”
$11 (2nd donation), Christoph V.
$11 (2nd donation), Denis Š.
$11 (2nd donation), Etienne G.
$11 (2nd donation), Holger K.
$11 (2nd donation), Jean Charles A.
$11 (2nd donation), Junaid N.
$11 (2nd donation), M.B.
$11 (2nd donation), Markus Z.
$11 (2nd donation), Richard L.
$11 (2nd donation), Sergei Petrov
$11 (2nd donation), Thaha J.
$11, A. Dent
$11, Adam J.
$11, Alain C.
$11, Andreas W.
$11, Antonio S.
$11, Basil M.
$11, Bokor A.
$11, Chris L.
$11, Christian E.
$11, Christian H.
$11, Christian K.
$11, Christian O.
$11, Cristian G.
$11, Cristian Virgil B.
$11, Daniel A.
$11, Enea L.
$11, Fortunato M.
$11, Franco D.
$11, Georg W.
$11, Gerald H.
$11, Gerhard Z.
$11, Giuliano L.
$11, Guerrino C.
$11, Hakan C.
$11, Harald F.
$11, Igor C.
$11, Ines G.
$11, Jason C.
$11, Jerome L.
$11, Jochen M.
$11, Johanna F.
$11, John D.
$11, Jørn D.
$11, Kamil G.
$11, Krzysztof S.
$11, Leonard H.
$11, Marco P.
$11, Marek C.
$11, Martin D.
$11, Michael M.
$11, Michael W.
$11, Miloš H.
$11, Norman S.
$11, Oliver A.
$11, Paolo B.
$11, Pawat A.
$11, Peter T.
$11, Robert S.
$11, Roberto M.
$11, Rolf B.
$11, Romano C.
$11, Salvatore C.
$11, Sandor A.
$11, Saro E.
$11, Sascha A.
$11, Scholtz T.
$11, Stephan K.
$11, Thomas S.
$11, Thomas W.
$11, Thomas W.
$11, Troels R.
$11, Ulrich H.
$11, Umberto B.
$11, zukasz K.
$10 (107th donation), Thomas C.
$10 (26th donation), Bruce M.
$10 (18th donation), Slobodan Vrkacevic
$10 (15th donation), platypus products
$10 (14th donation), Tomi P.
$10 (11th donation), TONY aka “STRUZZIN ELECTRONICS”
$10 (10th donation), Kleiner Funk-Electronic
$10 (9th donation), redman
$10 (7th donation), Geoffrey P.
$10 (5th donation), Joseph G.
$10 (5th donation), Stan aka “Dataful.Tech”
$10 (5th donation), Steven L.
$10 (4th donation), jacobsen.biz
$10 (4th donation), James N.
$10 (4th donation), Jefferson Fernando L.
$10 (3rd donation), Gene E.
$10 (3rd donation), Helena K.
$10 (3rd donation), Jorge Arturo V.
$10 (3rd donation), Narate T.
$10 (2nd donation), aka “Vel”
$10 (2nd donation), Abe Z.
$10 (2nd donation), Chris P.
$10 (2nd donation), Craig D.
$10 (2nd donation), Detlef D.
$10 (2nd donation), Gerold H.
$10 (2nd donation), Jonathan E D.
$10 (2nd donation), Jose Vicente M.
$10 (2nd donation), Sebit M.
$10 (2nd donation), Seby C.
$10, Alexander M.
$10, Alfred P.
$10, Andranik S.
$10, Carlos G.
$10, CHAN S. C.
$10, Chris P.
$10, CobyW50
$10, Dana W.
$10, Daniel G.
$10, ihar I.
$10, James G. C.
$10, John H.
$10, John M.
$10, Johnathan B.
$10, Lawrence C.
$10, leo M.
$10, Maarten van der Loo aka “Lodewijk”
$10, Murad M.
$10, Paul Ove M.
$10, Richard H.
$10, Roy F.
$10, Sergei S.
$10, SERGIO IVAN LIRA RODRIGUEZ
$10, Stephen M.
$10, Stephen W.
$10, Thomas D.
$10, Tizian D.
$10, William B.
$10, William L.
$184 from 46 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Patrons:

Linux Mint is proudly supported by 1,528 patrons, for a sum of $3,810 per month.

To become a Linux Mint patron, please visit https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint