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.
Syncthing has been so helpful in making me move away from cloud based options. And to think only reason I found out about it and gave it a shot was because I was trying to figure out how to easily sync my non Steam game save files between my Desktop and my Steam Deck. It’s been invaluable since then.
Donate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.
LibreOffice too for that matter. Kick 'em a few bucks if you can spare it.
Thanks for the reminder! Donated 5 euros (I’m unemployed so can’t spare more right now)
You gotta give.
You hit me in the cup
Syncthing
That is a very cool project that I’d never heard of. Thanks for sharing!
Welcome to the biggest rabbit hole of your life. Syncthing itself isn’t huge, but the capacity to divest from the big cloud providers is. I say it’s a rabbit hole because you’ll quickly be finding new ways to use it.
How does that differ from something like Nextcloud?
Nextcloud is, as the name says, a dedicated server used as a cloud. Syncthing only syncronises fders between devices. You dont need a dedicated server for this that stores all the data.
Oh nice! I felt like website did a bad job at explaining what it is and how it works
Like, it doesn’t say if it uses one of their servers or if the two devices should be up at the same time. If so, that’s really unfortunate
it doesn’t say if it uses one of their servers
It does not.
if the two devices should be up at the same time
You can’t sync 2 devices when they have no way to connect to each other, so no.
I would recommend getting a server. And by “server” I mean literally any computer with Syncthing installed and left on. Could even be an old phone or something (with sufficient storage). That way there’s always 1 device to sync to.
The devices need to be running at the same time, which isn’t that much of a problem, if you e. G. only want to sync your PC to your mobile.
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.
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. :)
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”.
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!
I switched for the first time a few weeks ago!! I didn’t realise until I booted my Windows partition earlier for work that I hadn’t used it one single time since I did that because it was still open on the download page and forced a hundred updates on me 😅 it’s really fun and freeing, I’ve tried a few and settled on Pop!_OS because I love the simplicity, the pretty desktop environment and the window tiling
So cool! So you basically kept windows in one part of your machine and ran pop os on the rest? Really cool idea!
It’s a bit easier if you have a separate drive that Linux can own.
I was reading about this solution. My main laptop is a MacBook Air with M2 so I don’t think I can run any version of Linux on it. I have an old windows laptop I’m thinking about trying it on.
Would Linux still run fine on an older laptop?
Yeah!! I haven’t had any trouble with it yet, my laptop has only one SSD slot which is why I did it on the same one. I just switch when I boot up. I have the Windows one just in case I can’t get a game to run and to access my work’s shared drive (absolutely cannot figure it out on Linux lol)
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
Not so fast. LibreOffice has a network version.
Never even qualified for SOLDIER.
And has to cope by pretending he’s literally this other dude
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.
Is it not the same software they heard about in 2010?
It was discontinued in 2011. Anything that is out there today is outdated at best, and malicious at worst.
… so it is precisely the software they heard about in 2010
Oracle bought (and quickly killed) it. It’s not under active development, and anything that claims otherwise is likely malicious. LibreOffice is a lot of the original OpenOffice devs who got fed up with the way things were going, and jumped ship.
It literally is.
What happened to Openoffice?
Oracle bought and ratfucked it.
I still use it sometimes.
Why would you do that to yourself???
I would recommend switching to LibreOffice, it is definitely more performant and modern.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice
It seems it’s still legit, but of course Libre Office is the better choice.
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.
Yeah, I didn’t like it either
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!
spoiler
sdfgasfsaasdf
Yeah I’m wondering for how many weeks.
And then how many millions of ms office users there are? (Or billions…)
spoiler
sdfgasfsaasdf
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.
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.
They’ll have to settle for “warning” the user if they detect a file that was made by libreoffice.
The warning can be disabled from the settings
It’s still enabled by default and acts as FUD for the average user who won’t know to disable it and will get spooked by it.
That it can be opted out of doesn’t change its propaganda value at all.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Donating is easy, just follow the url on the homepage. /s
Good idea. I’ll add it to my seedbox.
what version(s) are best to help out? Windows 64 bit?
Probably, yes. You would assume the influx of users was mostly windows users.
Took them long enough.
Now how long will it take them to try Linux?
So here’s a single data point for you, in a good couple months (for money reasons) I was gonna switch over to Bazzite or another distro if it came preinstalled
So with a sample size of 1 we know 100% of people you’ve found are switching to linux
It’s finally (your) Year of the Linux Desktop!
Soon ™
for money reasons
Should we tell them Linux is free? 😀
Well there’s the small matter of the new computer
But oh NOW you tell me I don’t need to wire $600 to a random person
You can dual boot on pretty much whatever you have, though I recommend buying a separate drive for Linux for minimum headaches.
But yeah, I get it. Linux will be there when you’re ready.
Please don’t suggest newcomers to dual boot. It’s very technical and requires a lot of knowledge and effort to troubleshoot when windows eventually fights back with new shenanigans. It provides a skewed impression of what using Linux is like.
Just suggest to try the distros as a live USB. It gets them 90% of the way into an install, and it’s perfectly safe and reversible.
Give Linux a whole, separate drive and then there’s no concern about Windows doing anything.
Yeah is that completely safe? I’m really tempted to try out Mint and I have an old M2 from my previous machine I could format and use for it. The PC is my work/editing station though so can’t afford any risk. I can’t really make the switch since I’m still dependent on LR+PS (Adobe…) but most of my other software should work, and I’ve just always wanted to get into Linux but not sure if it’ll actually benefit me and my work or if it’s just gonna cause me even more hassle than windows currently does.
I’m familiar with messing around in the BIOS, changing boot priority and formatting stuff and whatnot.
Linux needs to sound a lot less intimidating for people who don’t really do tech besides the very basics.
people who don’t really do tech besides the very basics
i’ve been building my own PCs since the 90s and have basic hardware and network certs, and want to try linux, but it seems daunting to me
The biggest issue people face when switching to Linux is finding Linux alternatives to their apps.
At this point it’s much easier than it was in the 90s
That said, games can still cause issues.
I’ve found Linux Mint to be easier to install and use than Windows. (I don’t have to enter the console and allow myself to setup an offline account because no network drivers were working in Linux. Windows 11 did that).
I’ve never had issues with graphics drivers, despite using Nvidia cards. The only issues with Linux have been because I broke something when I was messing around.
Get a USB drive, burn a Linux ISO to it, and try it out without installing it.
And then something doesn’t work during installation or you have to postpone it, you have to abort the installation, run into the MMOK error that blocks you from installing ANY UEFI Linux…just happend to me. I REALLY like the idea of Linux but man, if such things still happen :/.
Blame UEFI problems to all the shit M$ makes. It’s their fault.
While true, that unfortunately doesn’t change the reality that many potential new users will run into issues like this
But hey, the more Linux users there are, the more manufactures will be forced to fix their shit
The hardest part is picking a username and seeing what the name of the app store is on the distro
please don’t call it app store, I just threw up a little in my mouth :(
Package Manager!
We have to be hip and shorten it, so like maybe instead of package manager it can be pacman or if maybe by distro so like the popos can have a pop shop
pacman is the name of an actual package manager iirc
I’m practically tech illiterate, but managed to switch myself over to Linux after watching some guides a few years ago.
He’s the 1st one I used: https://youtu.be/4mySqL4bCSw
It isn’t, really. As @CosmicTurtle0 pointed out in their response, it’s mostly finding alternatives to your apps.
Apropos: fuck mozilla for enshittifying the last viable open source browser alternative :( It’s the one I have not found an alternative for yet.
Other than that: Thunderbird is WAY better than Outlook anyways. Gimp is arguably lacking some features that Photoshop people are used to, but works just fine (albeit takes some getting used to) for non graphic designers. LibreOffice is functioning better than Microsoft Office by a long shot in Writer and Calc - and up to par in Impress (presentations.) VLC should already be your media player of choice anyways. Element (Matrix) and Telegram desktop applications come with most distros nowadays. Desktop environment of choice is available, from very comfortable to very rudimentary and blazingly fast.
Steam works, many many games on steam work (but then again, maybe prefer gog / good old games, as it is not US based).
PDF readers: okular is probably your best bet, digital signatures work fine but the interface for signing a document could be improved a bit.
For my system, that’s kind of it - everything else is native Linux stuff anyways :)
Element 🤢
Telegram 🤢
If you’ve installed fresh Windows off a usb then process is the same for Linux, and you don’t really need to mess with terminal by just using the Microsoft Store equivalent on the Linux distro you choose. I didn’t find it too different from using Windows or MacOS. I was able to download all my usual programs like Steam and Firefox off the Linux appstore.
But if I had to install a program outside of the Linux store they usually came as a sh or deb file.
If it was deb I’d open terminal where the deb file was and type in
sudo dpkg -i filename.debAnd if sh I’d open terminal where the sh file was and type in
sh ./name_of_file.shThat’s pretty much the only terminal commands I’ve needed to know to get started.
When it came to drivers I was lucky enough to have it be pretty much handle everything for me on my old laptop out the box. Main reason I had tried Linux was because Windows ran slow on it, and also an old scanner I had didn’t have drivers that supported it anymore. But, on Linux the scanner just worked.
And in some desktops you can click on the deb file and it asks you I’d you want to install it.
How about this: I’ll offer installation support and free tech support for three months to the first 20 people that ask. Free of charge. I only have three conditions:
- You pick from a handful of distros I’m willing to support - Debian, Fedora, openSUSE Leap
- You donate any amount of money to any FOSS project or contribute something to a FOSS project
- I reserve the right to not help get certain Windows software working, like anything Adobe
Exactly. I’m really interested in running Linux but it would be more of something interesting to try when I have time rather than an actual OS change.
The biggest issue for me is I’m a photographer and I depend on Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. I know there are open source alternatives, but from what I’ve seen they are far behind adobe.
I guess dual boot could be a solution :)
Ooo I didn’t know about this I shall look into it.
Could you do it on Windows?
Haven’t done it myself yet! I’m planning to switch to Linux Mint later this year, and have a dual boot with Windows on the side, so I can switch at any time if needed.
I think it has a built-in dual boot feature:
I advise backing up your harddrive and stuff to prevent problems, or having one for Windows and the other one for Linux so you avoid problems. Credits here: https://opensource.com/article/18/5/dual-boot-linux#Ubuntu
I have no experience with this yet, always double verify! I think Mint uses GRUB
Arch linux also has a more in depth post on this
Thanks!
I have to wonder what the October end of life for Windows 10 will bring in that regard.
Computers are expensive. Some people will buy something new, others won’t be able. That crowd has 2 options of finding a new OS or using one that’s no longer supported.
Most people will just continue using an out of date operating system because they don’t understand the security risks. It happens every time MS ends support of an OS line.
Time to start selling thigh-high programming socks then.
Love to see it. I haven’t used MS Office in well over a decade at this point and I have no plans to go back. LibreOffice is fantastic, suits all my needs, doesn’t pack itself with bloat and it respects my freedom and privacy. What more can I want from an office suite?
It doesn’t surprise me, Microsoft is enshitifying everything they have.
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
I’ve gone full circle
Loved sheets, then hated them because we should just use a DB
Now I do stuff in sheets with a tab explaining how I got the data because I can email it to someone and in 4 months it still answers their questions.
For me it was about freedom, and not being locked into the Microsoft sphere.
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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.
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.
The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn’t advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.
Microsoft doesn’t want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there’s still a market for it.
Wow, the way they write “best value” on the offer for 8.50 £/month is just brazen.
If you use Office Home 2024 for 120£ for just 15 months or more it’s already cheaper.
What’s annoying, too, is that a lot of the methods that have traditionally been used for discounts (education, nonprofit, employer-based discounts) are now only applicable to the subscriptions. So if you do want to get a standalone copy and would ordinarily qualify for a discount, you can’t apply that discount to that license.
And if you monitor Slickdeals, you can often get a copy for under $40.
