Libre Office on Intel versus PPC

[beachycove]

I have today been reading and annotating a student's thesis using Libre Office (she had written in Open Office, and the tracking of text insertions, annotations/notes etc. that I want to add are not all preserved on conversion to and from Microsoft Word). It is a 132pp. document with several hundred footnotes, but otherwise contains no difficult formatting.

I had tried to do the deed first on a 12" PowerBook G4, 1.5GHz, and while it was possible to do the work on the G4, the machine was struggling. I then tried on a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook. Surprisingly, the going was still slow, though it was certainly better than it was on the PowerBook. Frustrated, and asking myself why people would choose to use such limited software, I decided to try on a dual G5, just to see the effect. To my surprise, the G5 proved to be by far the best of the three, and I will be using it tonight and tomorrow to complete the task.

NeoOffice, BTW, was also tried, but was more or less unusable on the PowerBook. I did not try it out on the other two.

The G4 runs Tiger. Both the others run Leopard. The 15" MacBook was a high-end machine in its day, has a much, much better graphics processor than either of the others (NVidia 5200s in the two of them), and is theoretically more than twice as fast as the G5. But the G5 is the pick of the litter for this work.

Please explain. Has someone optimized a PPC build of Libre Office, perchance?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I'm surprised by this too. OpenOffice on my G5 was horribly slow, but it did run Tiger, so maybe the 10.5 JVM is better? Still, this makes me want to try Libre now.

 

[PowerPup]

LibreOffice is actually reducing their dependence on Java. NeoOffice (AFAIK,) is using OpenOffice as their based code. So it makes sense that Libre would be working the best.

The only things I can think of that would still cause Libre to be slow on the G4 and Intel is the GTK GUI, and core parts still using Java. As for why the G5 is doing better than the C2D, who knows? Maybe the kind of batch work you're doing is just performed faster on the G5.

 

[beachycove]

Just to clarify: I still would not use this software on a regular basis, as it really is not the equal of the commercial offerings; in other words, there are endless frustrations with it, such as its nasty habit of going to the beginning of a 132pp. document rather than staying on p. 87 where you were editing, should you be so rash as to change from page layout to web view (Oh the horror!).

However, it is fast enough to be perfectly usable on the G5 for my purposes, and has proven also to be stable.