LibreOffice on MacBook Pro Catalina vs. new MacBook Air

Catalina is unsupported by Apple and Microsoft. A new Mac is up to you and your budget.

You can continue using Catalina and LibreOffice until that MacBook Pro dies… though you will be missing out on newer Apple security fixes and eventually LibreOffice updates as they require newer versions of macOS. The Document Foundation offers native Apple Silicon builds of LibreOffice and it works fine on macOS Tahoe now. It will be around in the future too.

Apple's Pages and Numbers are not Microsoft clones and you cannot edit existing Microsoft documents in them. You must translate (open) the Word and Excel files to native Pages and Numbers documents, make changes, then export them back to Microsoft formats. Apple does not guarantee the accuracy of that process and there be dragons…

Catalina is no longer enough to run the latest version of LibreOffice. It requires Big Sur or later.

The Document Foundation does maintain an archive of older, unsupported versions of LibreOffice for operating systems including Catalina. It appears that 25.8.7.3 is the last version that supports Catalina. You'd want the kit from the mac / x86_64 directory.

The Document Foundation Wiki – Documentation/System Requirements

The Document Foundation – Download Archive

The Document Foundation – Download Archive – LibreOffice 25.8.7.3

This is still likely to be polished enough be useful, even if it no longer receives bug fixes or new features.

mundyabney wrote:

I have finally managed to save entries to Excel and Word documents beyond that fated date by using LibreOffice, and I wonder how simple and convenient that might be into the future?

I have used MS Office and LibreOffice (mostly documents and spreadsheets and a few presentations) side by side at work and at home very old LibreOffice versions in my very old Macs back to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

I have never seen any glitches in my quite simple documents. AFAIK sometimes LibreOffice might be more compatible regarding old Office documents than MS Office itself.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/System_Requirements

https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/

Catalina is still enough to run the latest versions of

• The Mozilla Firefox browser
• The parts of Affinity Studio that are "free with registration" (basically, the non-AI stuff that used to be in Affinity Photo V2, Designer V2, and Publisher V2)