14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation announced the availability for public testing of the beta release of the upcoming LibreOffice 6.3 open-source office suite for all supported platforms.
The third major instalment in the LibreOffice 6 series, LibreOffice 6.3 is coming this summer with another layer of performance improvements, as well as cool new features and enhancements. Development on LibreOffice 6.3 kicked off last November, and the first beta version is now ready for public testing for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
"LibreOffice 6.3 will be released as final in mid-August 2019, being LibreOffice 6.3 Beta 1 the second pre-release since the development of version 6.3 started in mid-November 2018," reads the announcement. "Since LibreOffice 6.3 Alpha 1, 683 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 141 bugs have been set to FIXED in Bugzilla."
LibreOffice 6.3 no longer supports 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions
Apart from the all the improvements and new features, LibreOffice 6.3 comes with an important change for Linux users, namely the removal of support for 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions. What this means is that there won't be 32-bit binaries of LibreOffice 6.3 available for download, but only 64-bit binaries for 64-bit Linux distros.
However, according to The Document Foundation, this doesn't mean that 32-bit Linux compatibility will be removed, so if you already have LibreOffice installed on your 32-bit Linux operating system, you'll still receive updates for that version, but you won't be able to upgrade to LibreOffice 6.3, which arrives in early August 2019.
Until then, the development cycle of LibreOffice 6.3 will continue with a second beta release at the end of June, and three RC (Release Candidate) versions through July. The LibreOffice 6.3 office suite series will receive a total of six maintenance updates until it will reach end of life next year on May 29th, 2020.