LibreOffice 6.1 Released With New Colibre Icon Theme, Native Gtk3 Dialogs, Improved EPUB Export

The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 6.1 today, a release which includes a new icon theme called Colibre, native Gtk3 dialogs (if the Gtk3 backend is used), faster image handling, improved EPUB export, and more.

The free and open source office suite LibreOffice 6.1 includes a new icon theme, called Colibre, with this release. The icon theme is based on Microsoft's icon design guidelines, and its purpose is to make the application more visually appealing to users coming from the Windows environment. Calibre is set as the default icon theme on Windows.

LibreOffice 6.1 using the new Calibre icon theme

On Gnome-based desktop environments, elementary is now the default icon theme, while Industrial and Oxygen icon themes were removed, but were made available as extensions.

What's more, if the Gtk3 backend is in use, LibreOffice 6.1 uses native Gtk3 dialogs:

LibreOffice also includes reworked image handling with the latest 6.1 release, which is a lot faster thanks to the improved lifecycle handling and a new graphic manager.

Other important changes in LibreOffice 6.1 include:

Base: a new Firebird database engine is now the default option in while in experimental mode
Improvements to the importing filter for Microsoft Excel 2003 XML
Improved EPUB export:

Improved link support, table support, image support and font embedding
Cover image support, improved metadata support, footnote and image popup support, support for fixed layout
Support vertical writing by export writing-mode in the page style as CSS body styles.
Export ruby text

Much improved performance of converting between small ODT and XHTML documents
It's now possible to generate a signature line (Insert > Signature line), which can be signed using a digital certificate
Added support for signing (not only verifying) ODF documents with ECDSA keys on Linux and macOS
GUI changes:

Background images in Gallery and Area Fill dialog have been completely reworked
New RYB Standard palette, based on Itten RYB color ring theory
New set of default gradients
New Karasa Jaga icon theme (it was initially created for Sundara OS, and is heavily inspired by the now discontinued Oxygen icon theme)
New gear button / menu added to the Customize dialog which makes it easy to customize toolbars and top level menus

LibreOffice 6.1 also includes various LibreOffice Online improvements, and other changes. Read the complete release notes here.

As a side note, to change the LibreOffice icon theme, go to the Tools menu and select Options, then select LibreOffice > View from the sidebar and select a new icon theme from the Icon style drop-down, like this:

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 6.1 ships with the newest features and is targeted at early adopters and power users. For regular and enterprise users, the more mature LibreOffice 6.0 is recommended.

On Linux, LibreOffice is also available as:

At the time I'm writing this, FlatHub has yet to be updated with LibreOffice 6.1. The Snap Store offers LibreOffice 6.1 in the candidate channel for now (it uses the Gtk3 backend). Update: The LibreOffice AppImage was updated to version 6.1 (it's not using the Gtk3 backend).