Developers from The Document Foundation have launched LibreOffice 25.8 Beta 1 for public testing across Linux, macOS, and Windows. They plan to release the final stable version in late August 2025.
Advertisеment
As part of this update, the team removed support for older platforms. Starting with LibreOffice 25.8, the free office suite will no longer work on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 . Users of these legacy operating systems have options to go with LibreOffice 25.2 or 24.8, but not a newer version.
Notable changes in LibreOffice 25.8
This new version brings various improvements to core applications such as Writer, Calc, and Impress. It also fixes several bugs, and finally includes a new privacy feature in the Auto-Redact tool. The latter now allows users to remove all images from a document with ease. Additionally, the software now better handles punctuation rules across multiple languages. helping avoid formatting issues in multilingual documents.
In Calc, users can now take advantage of several new functions that make it more competitive with Excel. These include TEXTSPLIT, VSTACK, and WRAPROWS, which improve data manipulation and layout flexibility. Meanwhile, Impress now properly supports embedded fonts in PPTX files, making file sharing with PowerPoint users much smoother and more reliable.
The LibreOffice interface has also seen small but useful refinements. For example, users of Writer and Calc can now enter rotation mode for objects with just one click. On macOS, the update includes improved integration features such as native full-screen support and enhanced window management options introduced through the Sequoia project.
Earlier this month, The Document Foundation joined the End of 10 initiative, which promotes moving away from outdated Windows 10 PCs by adopting Linux-based operating systems. They point that users don’t need to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path. Instead, they can choose a more open and flexible alternative: combining Linux with LibreOffice. In their opinion, these tools offer a strong, privacy-focused, and long-term solution that competes well with the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
