MMMay 2019891a23Dig13iKmOlv May 2019 LXF249 85
hotpicks
GOOGlEdriVECliEnt
OffiCESuitE
Press‘Synchronise’
tomergethe
contentsofyour
GoogleDriveto
thelocalfolder.illions of Linux users have Google accounts,
yet there is no official Google Drive client for
Linux. Currently available options imply
mounting the cloud storage as a FUSE drive (http://
bit.ly/lxf249fuse), or using proprietary software like
InSync. But we’ve discovered a much easier way of
synchronising your local files with your Google account.
ODrive is a nice little Electron-based application that
is very easy to work with. The name stands for Open
Drive and should not be confused with the odrive cloud
storage service, which has different software. The hero
of our review has just one window and a tray applet,
and sets up your connection in a few seconds.
There are two steps: one for authenticating with
Google and giving the app the required permissions,
and the other for choosing a local directory for
synchronising. The big blue button fires up the sync
process and keeps you informed about the number of
transferred files.
Closing the main ODrive window leave it running and
accessible via the tray icon. The sync daemon detects
ODrive
local changes in your Google Drive directory and syncs
file automatically, without the need to do anything else –
so in a way ODrive is a decent replacement for other
Google Drive clients. It doesn’t have selective sync and
leaves you with the ‘all or nothing’ sync approach, but
still, it is fully FOSS software and has proven to be
usable by non tech-savvy users. Despite being so
minimalistic, ODrive has been in rapid development,
so new features are expected to land soon.
ODrive is a cross-platform application, with the
official AppImage download available from the project’s
page at GitHub. As with most other Electron-based
apps, ODrive behaves exactly the same way on all
supported platforms.Version: 0.2.0
Web: http://bit.ly/lxf249odrive
ew releases of LibreOffice are hard to miss
because this office suite is one of the most
successful and widely used open source
projects.The new 6.2 version brings a bounty of
valuable new features, fixes and improvements –
the official Release notes page from The Document
Foundation takes half an hour of thoughtful reading.
Some things are really worth trying, although not
immediately noticeable without prior knowledge.
The first is the extended menu of alternative user
interfaces that include a sidebar style, a tabbed
interface and a ‘groupbar’ mode. The latter two have a
visual resemblance to the (in)famous Ribbon interface
from Microsoft, except that LibreOffice doesn’t force
you to use any mode and lets you quickly switch from
one to another. The feature sits in the View > User
Interface menu, but only if you enable the experimental
LibreOffice features in Tools > Options > Advanced.
Another important feature is the official unveiling of
the updated KDE interface plug-in. LibreOffice finally
stops looking like an alien when used with KDE Plasma
LibreOffice
or LxQt thanks to the new VCL plug-in, which supports
Qt5 and KF5 styles. The confusing variety of VCL plug-
ins found in previous versions of LibreOffice has been
fixed. Gone are gtk2 and kde4 plug-ins, and we now
have just two integration packages for Gnome (gtk3)
and KDE (kde5).
Of course, all these visual changes shouldn’t obscure
the titanic work that has been done to improved Writer,
Calc, Impress, Math and Draw. LibreOffice works
snappier and better than ever, and those who regularly
work in this suite will surely have a great time with the
new version. There is no need to wait for LibreOffice 6.2
to land in your Linux distribution repos – the official
download page already has all you might need.Version: 6.2
Native Qt5 widgets
in Libreoffice? Very
nice indeed!n
M