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.
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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.
Syncthing
That is a very cool project that I’d never heard of. Thanks for sharing!
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 Anything that is out there today is outdated at best, and malicious at worst.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
It literally is.
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.
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.
Oracle happened to it
All the devs went to LibreOffice after that
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
Holy shit 1mill a week? That’s huge
Yeah I’m wondering for how many weeks.
And then how many millions of ms office users there are? (Or billions…)
I mean does it matter? Any open source program competing with THE established office suite that literally everyone learns getting that kind of adoption is insane. This is like an open source video game console competing with Sony.
Oh it’s great news either way. I’d just be curious about the numbers.
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 ™
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’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
networking is already a higher hurdle IMO
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.
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.
The hardest part is picking a username and seeing what the name of the app store is on the distro
I think the biggest factor in that is getting tutorials and such out there that focus on the basics, written by people who mainly do things on Linux using the basics and GUI tools. So much of the Linux content out there is focused on power users and even the tutorials for new users tend to be written by those power users who may have been tech focused before switching and forget or just don’t know how basic they really have to get to not make people feel intimidated. Given the right distro/desktop environment, and there’s plenty of good ones to start with, people can use Linux almost just how they use Windows. They just need someone to show them how without pushing them to do everything in the terminal too fast or going immediately to scripting as a solution to problems.
Successful propaganda. As if those people were able to install (or configure) Windows if it didn’t come preinstalled and with autoupdates…
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.
I think you are wildly underestimating the people who will say fuck it and keep rolling with 10. For that matter, how about the people who don’t even realize it’s EOL? Sure, they’ll get warnings, which they’ll promptly ignore.
Time to start selling thigh-high programming socks then.
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.
That is allot of stuff in a short time. Nice!
Good job! Welcome to Beltalowda :) Next up: join the OPA!
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.
Good. Finally. It’s about time.
For me it was about freedom, and not being locked into the Microsoft sphere.
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.
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zetaoffice/
Native Realtime collaboration on documents and spreadsheets is the last feature holding us back from switching in business environments.
Is 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.
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.
And IIIIII helped!
European countries should adopt linux and these alternatives instead of paying for windows and Microsoft. Much more private too.
