How to install LibreOffice 24.2 on Mint

[Human_63]

I love Linux Mint and I love that LibreOffice is included with it. What I don't love is that like any Debian-based Linux distro, Mint stubbornly holds onto outdated versions of LibreOffice well beyond their end-of-life date. Earlier this week, LibreOffice 24.2.0 made its debut. That seems like a radical departure from the previous version 7.4.6, but it's just a new date-based numbering system, in which the first number is the year, the second is the month, and the third is a sequential number. Unfortunately, the newest version I could update to from the PPA or FlatPak repositories was 7.4.6. Fortunately, where there is a will, there is a way, and the way I found was to install it manually from the DEB version, downloaded from libreoffice.org. The steps below will make the installation process relatively quick and painless. It's mostly point-and-click, requiring only one line of script in the terminal:

1. Point your browser to www.libreoffice.org and click 'Download'
2. on the download page, it will display the RPM version by default, which is not what you want. Select DEB instead.
3. Once the download is complete, open Files, Downloads, and find the Libreoffice archive you just downloaded.
4. Right click the archive and select Extract
5. Once the files are extracted, open the resulting folder, right click the DEBS folder inside and select 'Open in Terminal'.
6. In the resulting terminal window, type the following line: sudo dpkg -i *DEBS
7. Press Enter and you will be prompted to enter a password, after which the installation will run, taking a few minutes to complete,
8. Once the installation finishes, exit the terminal window and you're ready to run LibreOffice.
9. Optionally, if you have an older version of LibreOffice installed, you can easily remove it, using the Software Manager.

The only caveat with this method of installation is that by doing it this way, you will have pointed your computer away from Linux Mint's designated software repositories, and you will no longer receive automatic updates via the Update Manager. Instead, you will have to use the above procedure each time you install subsequent updates. But to my mind, that's a small price to pay.

[xenopeek]

Flathub from end of January has 24.2: https://flathub.org/apps/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice. This is available through Software Manager on Linux Mint.

But if you prefer system packages the above is an option as the PPA isn't updated yet.