LibreOffice is the go-to for people who want a capable, no-nonsense office suite that does not phone home or push subscriptions in their face. It handles everything from text documents and spreadsheets to presentations and databases, and it does so without asking for money or peddling AI.
Needless to say, keeping an open source project of this scale running is not free, even if the software itself is. The developers have now decided to make that point a little more obvious.
What is it?
The Document Foundation is adding a donation banner to the LibreOffice Start Center, the screen that greets you with recently opened documents when you first launch the app.
The banner is planned to occupy roughly the bottom quarter of the Start Center, with a short message on the left and an image on the right side. The image is scaled proportionally to the banner height and is positioned at the right edge, independent of whether the system uses a left-to-right or right-to-left layout.
The text also auto-adjusts its font size to fit the available space.
As for how often it shows up, the current implementation is set to display every single time you open LibreOffice, but the intended schedule is to show it after every successful LibreOffice update or once a month.
Why?, you ask. Well, free software is not free to maintain. The Document Foundation is fueled by donations and inconsistent corporate support, and like most open source projects, it is always doing more with less.
More donations mean faster development and contributors who can dedicate real time to the project instead of squeezing it around their day jobs.
During my testing of the master daily builds, the banner appears oversized when the display resolution is set to 1920x1080, and the overall look and feel are pretty primitive at this stage with the placeholder text and image.
Combined with the existing donate button on the start page that leads to LibreOffice's donation page, the donation banner should help pull in more monetary contributions.
This change has already been merged and is expected to be included in the upcoming LibreOffice 26.8 release that is scheduled for an August release. The donation banner will undoubtedly go through a few more stages of refinement before it debuts.
Via: Phoronix
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Sourav Rudra
