The next major release of LibreOffice will use native GTK3 dialogs on Linux desktops.
“Wait —LibreOffice doesn’t already use GTK dialogs?!” you might be asking. It was certainly my own first reaction when I opened an e-mail about the news in our tip inbox this morning (btw – thanks Dee!)
Admittedly I do not use LibreOffice properly. Like, at all. Nothing against the suite itself — it’s rather marvellous — it’s just that the only writing I tend to do takes place inside a WordPress editor.
But, as these before and after shots from LibreOffice developer Caolán McNamara, which he shared on his blog show, the switch to native GTK message dialogs helps the productivity suite look more at home on modern a GNOME based desktops like GNOME Shell:
Not a major transformation, but a welcome one.
Current versions of LibreOffice display VCL message dialogs with GTK theming. But, in LibreOffice 6.1, more than 475 message dialogs will transition over to native GTK dialogs.
For other changes tentatively aiming to ship in the next major release of the open source office suite check out the LibreOffice 6.1 wiki page.