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.
Yeah desktop apps era is back baby. Fuck you cloud.
Woowoo! Cloud has its place and I love it but it’s not for literally everything
I like my personal cloud.
I’m hoping to set one up later this year. I have an old laptop that has good enough specs to run it from my research - I just need to get everything off of it and swamp windows for Linux! Never did a Linux install so I’m excited.
Woo! Don’t hesitate to ask for help, Linux users usually don’t bite. 😀
Will do! Do you have any specific communities you recommend for asking for help in Linux / self hosting type stuff? :)
Here are a couple I like:
Thanks! I’m already in [email protected] :) great place!
As a lifetime Windows user who switched to Linux about ten years ago, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s designed to look and feel like Windows 7 so it’s an easier transition when you first move from Windows. Also Mint is a rock solid distribution and has been my daily driver for about 9 years now. And before I forget, Mint has great documentation and community so when you get stuck on something you can easily Google for help.
you can easily Google for help.
you can easily search the web for help using your favorite engine. :)
True there are other ways to search but I still find that Google surfaces the most relevant answers on the first page. At least when doing technical searches, it’s hit or miss with any other topic.
I switched from Microsoft to MintLinux two years ago. Satisfied. Microsoft free. Peace and Om.
Yep, I wish I was totally Microsoft free but sadly my work laptop is Win11. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve sat for over an hour on the phone with a level 1 tech going through the check list of non-fixes so they can bump me up to someone who has the authority to actually fix the issue, all the while thinking to myself “if this was Linux I could fix this myself in 10 minutes”.
Steam games work too now which is good.
When I get another job lined up that’s my goal. A job and these bills. And that car loan. And maybe a house… Man. Maybe two jobs.
OnlyOffice is also good - my preferred for the basic Word/Excel type stuff I do.
Yeah! To me LibreOffice just looks dated and, to be honest, shit. OnlyOffice has a much cleaner interface.
It also isn’t still carrying around 30 years of Java baggage from when it was Sun StarOffice, and everything inbetween.
Yeah I love LibreOffice’s customisability including sidebar etc, but OnlyOffice just performs a lot better and handles the most common formats better for me
Heck yeah, OnlyOffice gang
Never even qualified for SOLDIER.
And has to cope by pretending he’s literally this other dude. Pathetic.
Not so fast. LibreOffice has a network version.
I have a job that involves working with spreadsheets. I have Librecalc at home and both Libre and MSOffice at work. I have also had a college course about using Excel specifically. Both really can do mostly the same things but because MS does everything in a specific (backwards) way, people trained on MS who are not otherwise “computer people” can’t cope with needing to unlearn and relearn. So the end result is paraprofessionals are locked in.
I really enjoyed spreadsheets before becoming a programmer (I still enjoy them, I just spend less time on them) and basically self taught over the years using Google Sheets.
There are several really useful functions on sheets that simply do not exist in Excel, and there are others that work almost the same but not quite. Having to use Excel drives me insane sometimes because of how clunky it feels.
By contrast, using LibreCalc feels kinda how you’d expect an open source Google Sheets to feel? It’s slightly clunkier, but it gets the job done and generally feels better to use than Excel
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.
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?
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!
I’m afraid to find out how many people are still downloading OpenOffice, thinking it’s the same software they heard about back in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice
It seems it’s still legit, but of course Libre Office is the better choice.What happened to Openoffice?
Oracle bought and ratfucked it.
I still use it sometimes.
I would recommend switching to LibreOffice, it is definitely more performant and modern.
Why would you do that to yourself???
I like the austere layout
Oracle happened. https://www.pcworld.com/article/423300/why-you-should-ditch-openoffice-and-use-the-free-libreoffice-suite.html
Seriously, fuck Oracle with a rusty rebar. They already ruined mysql.
mysql -> MariaDB
OpenOffice -> LibreOffice
Oracle happened to it
All the devs went to LibreOffice after that
They were bought and made for profit.
Libreoffice doesn’t have read aloud feature which makes it useless to me. Neither did openoffice. Windows stil only program with it. And I use it for editing purposes.
Don’t forget to seed the torrents to help the servers. And donate if you can ✊🏻
Very few people will actually know how to do that.
Yes, but millenials have been doing it since we were kids. It’s not that hard, just embrace the joy of naughty computing.
Donating is easy, just follow the url on the homepage. /s
Hopefully more of us make donations. Free is good, but it’s nice to contribute even small amounts to your well used FOSS apps
Obligatory comment that endorses pirating software. We need to make sure this stereotype about Lemmy remains accurate.
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.
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Yeah I’m wondering for how many weeks.
And then how many millions of ms office users there are? (Or billions…)
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Oh it’s great news either way. I’d just be curious about the numbers.
And maybe those are only the ones that download it directly. But every Linux user downloads it from other repos.
If you’re going to download it, try the torrent option! That way, you can give back to the community that gives you LibreOffice.
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.
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
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.
Exactly.
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.
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.
Nice. Maybe now Microsoft will respond by
offering non-subscription optionsinventing a new proprietary industry-standard file format so their bloated ransomware remains mandatory.Fortunately platforms like docs are providing sufficient competition that I don’t think they’d be able to lock it down as effectively as they once could.
This is a great news! I hope more people would use open-source software like Libreoffice.
LibreCalc and python for the win! I just love from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, import json, import re, import urllib.request.
