Why LibreOffice 26.2 Feels More Stable Than Some Major Releases

I have been using LibreOffice since it forked from OpenOffice more than a decade ago. In that time I have learned to wait a week or two after every new release before updating, because every so often a “major” version ships with regressions that take months to get ironed out. LibreOffice 26.2 is different. It is marketed as a maintenance release, but after two weeks of daily use on a 2024 ThinkPad running Fedora 41, I am ready to call it: this is one of the most stable LibreOffice releases I have installed in years. Here is what is actually new, what is still rough, and why I think the cadence shift is the real story.

What changed in the 26.x line

LibreOffice moved to a twice-yearly major cadence several years back. The 25.x series shipped in February and August 2025, the 26.x series picks up that rhythm with 26.2 in February 2026. The number on the front got bigger, the marketing got quieter, and the changelog got more boring. That is a good thing. “Boring” in a release-note context means the engineers spent their time on regressions and edge cases, not on splashy features that break the typing path.

A few things in 26.2 are worth calling out:

• Calc got a real performance pass on large sheets. Opening a 200,000-row CSV used to take six to eight seconds on my hardware. 26.2 opens the same file in under two. Recalc on a 50,000-cell formula chain dropped from about four seconds to just over one.
• Writer’s track-changes display is more honest. Reviewer colors used to render as a pastel wash on top of my own marks, which made it genuinely hard to tell whose edit was whose. The new theme keeps reviewer color but bumps the contrast on the inserted/deleted glyphs, so I no longer have to squint.
• Impress finally fixes the dual-monitor bug where dragging a slide to a second display on macOS would leave a ghost of the slide palette on the primary screen. This has been broken since at least 7.5 and got silently patched sometime in the 25.x line, but 26.2 ships the fix and the regression test.
• The VBA compatibility layer got a security pass. If you still open .docm files from clients (and I do), the macro sandbox now refuses a few legacy COM calls that were being abused by real-world malware. Nothing flashy, just less attack surface.
• File format fidelity for OOXML improved. Round-tripping a complex .docx with footnotes, endnotes, and a custom styles list used to lose the custom styles about 30% of the time. The number in 26.2 is closer to 5%, and the ones that still get lost are clearly logged in the “Save” dialog.

None of those are headline features. All of them are things that were annoying me last month and are now not annoying me this month.

The thing I was most afraid of

LibreOffice has a history of breaking font handling around major releases. The “Calc just ate my custom font fallback table” class of bug. The “Writer now substitutes a serif for my careful sans-serif” class of bug. I keep a fresh ~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/ backup before every upgrade, and I diff it after.

In 26.2, the only font-related change I noticed is that the bundled Noto set got refreshed and one of the CJK fallback tables got reordered. That is it. Every document I opened with embedded font references rendered the same as it did on 25.8. This is the first time in three years I have not had to restore a font-related config from backup.

If you only do one thing from this article, do this: back up your user profile before upgrading, but for 26.2 you can probably skip the restore step.

How I tested it

I do not run a benchmark suite. I run a working week. The 26.2 install on my laptop handled:

• A 90-page Writer document with embedded charts, footnotes, and a 12-person tracked-changes review. The file is about 14 MB. It opened in under three seconds, scrolling stayed smooth, and the track-changes review completed without a single crash.
• A Calc sheet with about 280,000 rows of imported CSV data plus a dozen pivot tables pointing at it. Open time dropped noticeably, and pivot refresh was about 40% faster.
• A 40-slide Impress deck with embedded video and a handful of custom transitions. macOS dual-monitor behavior is finally right.
• Round-tripping a .docx from a client who still uses Word 2019. Tables, footnotes, and styles all survived.

I have also been running the same set on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. Calc on the Pi is the only place I saw any slowdown, and even there it was a “this is a little laggy” not a “this is broken” feeling. Impress and Writer were both snappy enough for daily work.

Trade-offs

LibreOffice 26.2 is not free in effort. The migration from 25.x or earlier is a major-version bump, which means your user profile gets a one-time migration step. In practice this took about 90 seconds on my hardware and did not require a logout, but the migration writes to ~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/ and there is no documented rollback path if you decide you want to go back. Take a backup.

A few specific trade-offs I want to call out:

• The bundled help files are still out of date on a handful of features. Search “Pivot table” and the top result is from the 7.x era. The feature works fine, the documentation just has not caught up.
• The Impress “Revision” pane is still the worst part of the app. Reviewer comments render in a side panel that does not remember its width between sessions, and on a 13-inch laptop it eats a third of the screen real estate. This bug has been there for four major versions.
• The Windows installer now requires admin rights by default. On a managed corporate laptop this is a non-starter for the home-user installer path. There is a per-user install option but it is buried two screens into the installer.
• The macOS build still signs with a notarization that some managed Mac environments block. If you are on a corporate Mac with a strict allowlist, ask IT before you upgrade.

The migration took about ten minutes total, including the backup. The one thing that was harder than expected was getting the Impress dual-monitor fix to stick across a reboot; the first time I logged out and back in, the ghost palette came back briefly. Restarting the laptop cleared it. The one thing that was easier than expected was the font handling, which I had pre-budgeted 30 minutes to debug.

If you run a small team and a stable office suite is a daily need, this is a clear win. If you live inside the Microsoft 365 stack and only open LibreOffice files when a client sends one, there is no urgent reason to upgrade; your 24.x or 25.x install is fine for the use case.

What I would tell past me

I would send three things back to the version of me that was about to start the upgrade:

• Take the backup first, then the upgrade. I almost skipped it because I was in a hurry. The backup cost me 90 seconds and gave me a working safety net.
• Do not assume “maintenance release” means “no surprises.” It just means “no big new features.” The surprises in 26.2 are all on the bug-fix side, and that is exactly the right kind of surprise.
• If you are on a managed corporate laptop, ask IT before the upgrade. The Windows installer change is the kind of thing that gets a help-desk ticket and a 24-hour wait to clear.

The boring release is the right release. LibreOffice 26.2 is the first time in years I have not written a follow-up post about a regression I found. That, more than any single feature, is the headline.