Interest in LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is on the rise, with weekly downloads of its software package close to 1 million a week. That’s the highest download number since 2023.
“We estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but it’s important to note that we respect users’ privacy and don’t track them, so we can’t say for sure,” said Mike Saunders, an open-source advocate and a deputy to the board of directors at The Document Foundation.
LibreOffice users typically want a straightforward interface, Saunders said. “They don’t want subscriptions, and they don’t want AI being ‘helpful’ by poking its nose into their work — it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,” he said.
There are genuine use cases for generative AI tools, but many users prefer to opt-in to it and choose when and where to enable it. “We have zero plans to put AI into LibreOffice. But we understand the value of some AI tools and are encouraging developers to create … extensions that use AI in a responsible way,” Saunders said.
I must be one of them. In the last couple of weeks I’m transitioning my apps and services to open source and EU based. I switched from Windows to CachyOS, switched my emails, switched browser, degoogled my phone, deleted FB and X and many more.
It feels so refreshing and free.
Good job! Welcome to Beltalowda :) Next up: join the OPA!
Lol what?
Dude. The Expanse was dope! Watch it. You won’t regret it. I’ve heard the books were better, but I lack the time to go through them right now : /
You won’t regret it.
I did. It was mostly … confusing. The scenes were uninnovative, boring, and ?too-american.
I didn’t like the first series, and would’ve quit it at episode 3 or so but I ended up without internet access for a couple of days and the whole series downloaded… It got better.
But yeah, life’s too short for TV shows that take time to be taken on faith. And if you did finish the first series and still not like it, more power to you.
Yeah, I didn’t like it either
The books are way better if you care to try.
Books were absolutely better, but the TV show was still awesome.
A reference to The Expanse.
The Expanse reference: Welcome to the poor, but honest plebs, next up join the rebellion ;)
That is allot of stuff in a short time. Nice!
Sure, to avoid costs…
They really don’t see the connection with the trade war, buy european movement, boycott america movement, trump presidency in general… Really? Or could it be the editor told them not to mention it?
As someone who has recently cancelled my Microsoft subscription and switched to libre office I can vouch that it was not the subscription cost that made me switch.
None of those have much real impact outside internet noise compared to people seeing their bank accounts drain.
I’ve been leaving corpo shit behind for years as a personal boycott, but even I found it much easier to invest time and effort moving off paid services than free ones because of a perceived material benefit beyond smug self-satisfaction.
You’re looking for enemies where there are none. I’m not a medical professional, but I assume this amount of paranoia is not good for your mental health and well-being. Just take the article for what it is: a win for free software
Sure, it is a win. And thank you for the wise words.
But to me it seems that many are looking to reduce dependency on US tech.
Unfortunately, world is such state that a little paranoia is warranted. If Snowden was not a wakeup call, now I finally feel there is a real movement to try to reduce the dependency. Keep in mind that the US currently threatens EU with occupation of Greenland and sides with our enemy.
But all that said, thank you again, kind stranger.
Came here to say this. The headline is misleading, the costs have been there for years. The thing that has changed are millions of Europeans and Canadians looking for American alternatives.
There was another article I saw related to a massive drop (over 70%!) in bookings between Canada and the US. It didn’t mention the reason for the drop in bookings. Not sure why the media is so reluctant to cover the massive American boycotts that are underway at the moment, especially on articles covering the impact.
Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?
I use libreoffice the same way I used microsoft office decades ago. Never really cared for ‘advanced’ or even ‘intermediate’ features because they are never necessary to what I’m doing.
I can’t imagine that people who are more computer-illiterate than me getting significantly more involved in what should be simple and easy to use programs.
Sometimes I think these little updates are just a ruse to upload our personal information without us knowing. I stopped auto-updating a few years ago and only update when the software is not running correctly or something new is introduced.
Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?
I feel like almost all the updates of the last two decades have been:
- Security updates in a code base that was traditionally quite vulnerable to malware.
- Technical updates in taking advantage of the advances in hardware, through updated APIs in the underlying OS. We pretty seamlessly moved from single core, 32-bit x86 CPU tasks to multicore x86-64 or ARM, with some tasks offloaded to GPUs or other specialized chips.
- Some improvement in collaboration and sharing, unfortunately with a thumb on the scale to favor other Microsoft products like SharePoint or OneDrive or Outlook/Exchange.
- Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
Some of these are important (especially the first two), but the user experience shouldn’t change much for them.
Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.
AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.
Sure, you could say “just be an Excel expert”, but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.
As someone who has taught many children how to use excel, the new AI features make using it easier but teaching and learning harder. A lot of stuff now happens automagically, and that makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work. So doing basic stuff is now trivially easy, but learning to become competent enough to do more creative and advanced stuff is more difficult.
A lot of stuff now happens automagically
Nothing happens automagically. You need to specifically ask Copilot to do something.
makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work
This I also don’t fully agree with. Like I mentioned, Copilot won’t automatically place formulas everywhere - it just designs them but you need to copy-paste them into the appropriate spots.
So, yeah, you’re not writing the formulas, but it’s not like the whole thing just magically appears.
Besides the jank, you can set up libreoffice inside a docker container and server it over https. There you now have cheap-ass MS365.
There’s also a network version of LO.
Microsoft Office is adding in AI? Spreadsheets can take a lot of work to create, I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error. Or not even know your calculations aren’t being done the way you want.
I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error.
It doesn’t put formulas into the cells. It will write the formula for you, but you have to put it in yourself.
Also, there’s versioning in Office, so your spreadsheet blowing up for whatever reason isn’t a problem at all - just roll back to the previous version of the file.
I just find it better, to do a little research on formulas, and figuring it out yourself. You’ll become better at spreadsheets. I’d have to try it though, it would depend on the actual implementation of it.
You’ll become better at spreadsheets
Great! Thing is: a day only has 24 hours and right now I need to get better at managing IT infrastructure and business processes, not spreadshets.
If you have the time to research Excel - go for it! Absolutely nobody is forcing you to use Copilot.
Excel is maybe the one place I can see AI being useful because lots of people can describe what they want a spreadsheet to do but not actually do it.
I just wouldn’t trust it to do it right
Exactly.
Which means you have to check each and every formula and we all now how difficult it is to read and understand excel formulas we didn’t write ourselves…
I find the ones I write myself hard enough to parse after 15 minutes of writing them.
I’m not jazzed about AI in document editors and spreadsheet software because I’m dyslexic enough that I have trouble finding some big errors.
Copilot can design a table, and even fill out some data, but it won’t input any formulas. It will write them for you and tell you where to put them, but you have to copy-paste them on your own.
Also, with versioning, even if it did and caused a problem, you could always just roll back to a previous version of the file. Not really an issue.
I’m glad to see foss Software taking off. In the past, we had to be a tech enthusiast to Realize it with an option. Now it’s pretty well known.
The large tech companies didn’t get greedy and try to be so gross with privacy settings. People wouldn’t make the move. They only have themselves to blame.
If you’re into music, there’s a great open source synthesizer.
The US becoming a questionable country and people realizing how almost every digital service and product is US based also ended up becoming a huge incentive to start seeking out alternatives instead putting all their eggs in one country. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have been making so many product shifts and seeking out foss alternatives or at the very least nonUS alternatives.
It’s been very cool seeing lot of people making attempts to try out stuff like Linux too even if they don’t stick with it.
My friend, FOSS has been readily available for more than a decade. Whether it’s LibreOffice or the GIMP or VLC or whatever, these are very old pieces of software.
It’s not taking off now. It already did. But now you personally are noticing. :-)
Been available for close to 40 years
Well, I’ve been using this software forever, I’m saying now, normal folks, I see in the light.
I’ve been using lmms, but this looks amazing
Hopefully more of us make donations. Free is good, but it’s nice to contribute even small amounts to your well used FOSS apps
LibreCalc and python for the win! I just love from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, import json, import re, import urllib.request.
My biggest pet peeve is since it’s a suite rather than separate programs, there’s only one path for saving files that’s saved. So you can’t have Writer save to a different location from Calc automatically.
As someone with a lot of files and folders, and a hatred of having to click around too much, this annoys the shit out of me. But I don’t think there’s any way around it because of how the program was created. It’s literally the one thing keeping me from switching.
Do you pin favorites? If you don’t, maybe that could help
You can request features on their website! It’s called enhancement request, go and contribute :)
We should all get Signal as well. If you don’t have it you’ll probably be surprised how many of your contacts do.
Not that much do though, but yea, people should
Nice try Hegseth
Why Signal, specifically?
it increases your chances of getting accidentally added to confidential group chats
If enough of us join up will completely suppress the United States’s ability to carry out military operations.
I was looking for this comment.
Its as usable as WhatsApp while being cryptographically secure and private.
WhatsApp is cryptographically secure but yea, still collects your contacts
A backdoor isn’t a flaw?
Source? Afaik there’s no backdoor in their cryptography, except maybe if using the cloud to back up your chats?
It’s widely regarded as the gold standard for secure communications.
THIS is what I was looking for. Thanks.
In the usa its just texting
I have to say I’m one of them. Cancelled my office subscription and an trying to avoid making the same mistake again. It was convenient though.
I used OnlyOffice thinking ‘Hey, this is a really similar alternative to MSO!’ Then bugs with slide previews and their ordering happened in the middle of presentations and even worse, memory usage ground my laptop to a halt (electron apps open up with close to 1GB of memory, such as obsidian).
Libre office still hasn’t crashed and the slide previews are accurate. The interface has always been a bit…unrefined even with the new tabbed layout but I can live with that.
I didn’t even know this existed until a few days ago. Downloaded an AppImage to try it out and was able to make a decent pdf with minimal hassle.
I was really worried I’d need to use Foxit Phantom Pdf just to edit a pdf a couple of weeks ago, but libre office draw was very little hassle, with the exception of a bit of shifting of text.
OpenOffice 3 had the best office suite UI I can imagine.
Dunno where all this “MS is good” comes from.
Don’t like today’s LO UI.
Haven’t used ms products in a decade.
My Microsoft boycott was longerIs it the best free option? It works fairly well although I can still kill it sometimes.
I know there’s a few other alternatives like OnlyOffice, wps office etc but these might be freemium.
Is it finally the year of foss? I love LibreOffice and started using it years back for personal use not wanting to bother with buying another Microsoft Office version once the one I had stopped getting security updates.
