just brew it! wrote:I would be very interested to hear how LibreOffice performs on it. While technically compatible with the Model B (in the sense that you could install it, and it would load without complaining), IMO it was so slow it was really more of an initial proof-of-concept than a useful application.
So, good news and bad news. The good news is, LibreOffice is much, much faster and more responsive on the Pi 2 than the old B. It takes what I thought was a surprising amount of time to load (fifteen seconds, maybe), but once that's done it runs well, no lag on input or mouse clicks. I wrote a few lines, saved the file in a number of different formats and as PDF, and opened them again. No issues at all.
Bad news came when I thought to check how it would handle a much larger file. I saved
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in HTML from gutenberg.org to the Pi, then loaded it with LibreOffice Writer.
It chugged for a few seconds, then displayed the HTML source and seemed to be all right. I could scroll down and still do all the normal things like edit, cut+paste etc. However, when I tried to jump to a point half-way through the file, it turned to molasses. It even bogged down the response of the entire system - I tried to switch away to the second desktop, back to Epiphany, and nothing happened. The CPU meter never went much beyond 50%, but the system wasn't doing anything. About ten seconds later, Writer started to render the file again (at the correct point I'd jumped to) at the same time as a box popped up saying something to the effect of, "LibreOffice Writer is not responding. Would you like to end the process?" I declined (as Writer had, in fact, finished the Herculean task of jumping through a large file) and checked to make sure the rest of the system was functioning normally, which thankfully it was.
So, LibreOffice on the Pi2 - absolutely fine for small documents, chokes on handling a novel-length file. That still makes it very useful to me (I can't remember the last time I had to open a novel-length document aside from this testing), but I can see that it might be problematic for others.