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 like LibreOffice, but I prefer Onlyoffice.
I love Libre so much
For me it was about freedom, and not being locked into the Microsoft sphere.
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.
You can request features on their website! It’s called enhancement request, go and contribute :)
Do you pin favorites? If you don’t, maybe that could help
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.
I used sheets because it was portable and flexible, but now I’d almost always just use a db instead.
My main use for excel now is “I need to send data to someone who isn’t a programmer” and doing json > CSV conversions to see if my 3000 rows of data from a 3rd party have all the necessary bits.
I guess it depends, I can make a pivot table in like 30 seconds, which is faster than setting up and loading data into a notebook.
I’ve used Libre Office, but unpopular opinion, the formatting sucks. I just pirated word, never paying for that again
Yup. I used Libra in college but getting the formatting right took longer than writing my papers. If I had to pay for a subscription to office I wouldn’t, and I don’t, I just prefARR’ my office apps.
I get that… dealing with hanging indentation was annoying.
I’ve used LibreOffice for years, and formatting is a constant struggle. I end up looking online to figure out how to make a small, simple change, and it turns out the only way to do it is by messing with styles, which is way more than I want. The focus on styles is LO’s biggest drawback, IMO.
The formatting… The formatting that you can easily modify. Sigh. It takes two minutes, my friend.
Anyway, you do you.
I mean, you’re likely right and I probably didn’t give it a good enough shot. I just haven’t had the smoothest experience with it. It took me twice as long to make an ugly Resume on libre than the time it took for me to make a decent one on “free” word
Sometimes proprietary software is still better than free or open-source software in several ways.
Other times, it’s the other way around, and in some cases, they’re similar, but everyone chooses based on their convenience and needs.
You’re keeping it entrenched.
Lack of quality replacement is keeping it entrenched. LibreOffice needs to step it up.
Have you tried OnlyOffice?
LaTeX is your friend
and word is better at formatting?
This is a great news! I hope more people would use open-source software like Libreoffice.
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 agree, I would never give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
Does it have the same shorcuts as microsoft excel?
Many of them work the same. Fill down etc. Not sure about more obscure ones.
Not sure but it’s free to download and try out
I ditched MS office for Libre long time ago, all I need it for is to open and view the occasional document anyways. For creating or editing documents I like Googles office suite better though
And IIIIII helped!
Yeah desktop apps era is back baby. Fuck you cloud.
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.
Woowoo! Cloud has its place and I love it but it’s not for literally everything
I like my personal cloud.
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.
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.
Steam games work too now which is good.
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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”.
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 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!
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)
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?
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 !selfhosted@lemmy.world :) great place!
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
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
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.
I think the “normal” usage is having an always on computer as a server and link all other devices to that one for updates.
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.
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.
Not so fast. LibreOffice has a network version.
Dropped the Word suite and used openoffice, then switched to libreoffice. Definitely a slightly clunkier feel to it, but avoiding yet more subscription, cloud based, internet connection needed, account needed software is becoming more and more important.
Been using openoffice for 15+ years, what made you switch to libreoffice?
For me it was docx. Oo couldn’t get the formatting right but libre could. This was back when docx was new and i was in school ao the teachers didn’t take off for strange lines or bad formatting.
Fair, open office still hates .docx lol
Libreoffice was created as a fork of OpenOffice because the development of OO became stale due to Oracle. If you’re still on OpenOffice, try LibreOffice - it’s kind of the same, but better
For the past like decade the only “updates” OpenOffice has been getting are questionable code comment changes from one dude. These changes literally do nothing, and people have suggested that the only reason he does it is to make OpenOffice seem like it’s still being developed, even though it was abandoned long ago.
Why? IDK, but I think it’s just some stubborn asshole with an axe to grind with the LibreOffice project. OpenOffice still has stronger name recognition than LibreOffice, so a lot of people still use it.
Lol is it really just like
// I did something, trust me
And he pushes it out lmao?
Pretty much: https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commits/trunk/
Open office isn’t getting much in the way of updates these days and is considered dormant and maintained by the Apache foundation. Libre-office is the office suite maintained by the document foundation and is where the bulk of developers moved over to.
OpenOffice’s old branding from Sun times was so nice though. Felt like modernity and magic in the sense of Star Wars prequels, Stargate SG-1, that warm kind of thing.
Pretty much what everyone said, especially better import/export of microsoft document formats - but one of the things they didn’t mention is that LibreOffice can be easily downloaded and installed from repositories. If I do a fresh linux install it’s just a command line or some other software package installer away. Super easy. I find LibreOffice runs smoother. Only downside is that sometimes it takes a while to load.
And if you’re using a full featured turnkey kind of distro like Mint, LibreOffice is pre-installed and ready to update via the repo.
Oracle.
Hahahahaha nice
We should all get Signal as well. If you don’t have it you’ll probably be surprised how many of your contacts do.
Why Signal, specifically?
It’s widely regarded as the gold standard for secure communications.
THIS is what I was looking for. Thanks.
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 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.
Nice try Hegseth
In the usa its just texting
Not that much do though, but yea, people should
